Ryan In J-School

Bicycles and Zombies

2007-05-29T21:03:00.000-07:00

It's pretty weird having nothing at all to do. Since I have graduated, don't have a job yet (thought I have some applications in), and have enough student loan money to left over to live on for a while, I've been living a rather surreal life of leisure for the last two weeks. It's fun, but kinda disorienting to have no responsibilities and no consequences. The past few days, I've been coming up with sort of odd things to do with my time, mostly to have something to write about on the blog.

On Saturday, I rode my bike all the way up and down the island of Manhattan, twice. On Sunday, I went to see two movies about zombies in the theater in the same day. That one managed to combine my love of zombies with my love of air conditioning in 90 degree heat.

First, the bike trek. I brought my bike with me to New York, in part because I'd only recently bought it in Easthampton and didn't feel like selling it so quickly. It's nice to have it, although my building doesn't have a bike room, so I have to lug it up and down five flights of stairs every time I want to use it, which is less than ideal. Avoiding the climb, I hadn't used it for a while, but I decided to get outside on Saturday. I noticed last fall that there was a bike trail that ran along the Hudson River, but I couldn't figure out how to get there, since it was on the other side of the highway. Eventually I asked someone, and was on my way. You can see the green line representing the path here.

My first task was to make it to the George Washington Bridge which looms in the northern part of the bike path. That proved to be trickier than I thought, involving going off the path due to construction and walking my bike through a fruit market. But after some wrong turns, I made it to the bridge and the Little Red Lighthouse underneath it. I figured I'd come all this way, I might as well go across the bridge, which took a half-hour walking detour through Washington Heights until I figured it out. The view from 212 feet up on the middle of the bridge were amazing, but when I stopped to admire it, I was freaked out by how the whole bridge shook with traffic. I got back on the bike and headed back.

I was surprsingly not tired at that point so I turned around and went back on the path headed south and found, as I suspected, that it runs all the way down to Battery Park, where the Staten Isand Ferry terminal is. So I managed to clear the entire island. It occurred to me that this would be a great way to see the city if you've never been -- in addition to the bridge, you pass the Chelsea Piers, can see the Empire State Building, World Trade Center site and the Statue of Liberty, even Frank Gehry's new building, which is just across the street from the path. All without subway tolls, traffic, or consulting a map. Turning around to head home, though, the long trip started to take its toll, but I made it just fine. And now I can say I've see the whole west side by bike.

I couldn't top that with anything athletic the next day, so I topped it with something slobby: the zombie movies 28 Weeks Later and Grindhouse (well, at least half a zombie movie on the second one). I wouldn't say that I'm a real big horror movie fan, but I love zombies. Love 'em. Probably mostly because there's usually some intelligence and satire behind them in the George Romero tradition. But also because zombies are cool for several reasons.

A) There are always a lot of them and there's no place to hide. B) The intriguing moral quandary of having to fight off the people you once loved who are now reanimated corpses hungering for your flesh. C) There are no goofy "rules" for defeating them (silver bullet, stake through the heart, sunlight, simple bacteria). You just blast away at them, but more soon come to take their place. D) As mentioned above, they form a nifty shorthand for whatever mindless group the filmmakers want to comment on.

I first went to see 28 Weeks, the sequel to 28 Days Later. I wasn't exactly looking forward to it before it came out, since it was a sequel with no one from the really creepy original movie involved, no stars, writers, directors, nothing. Just more from the cannibalistic people infected with the "rage virus" (they aren't technically zombies, but for all intents and purposes). But the decent reviews convinced me to see it, and it was pretty good. The "satire," if that's what it was, is pretty heavy-handed -- U.S. troops have to rebuild London after the apocalypse, and zombies eventually invade the fortified "green zone" etc. Nonetheless, it works, if you're into creepy scenes of deserted London and zombies gorily tearing people apart.

After the movie ended, I remembered that another recent zombie movie was still playing in New York (and probably nowhere else, after it tanked at the box office). I figured spending over five hours in horror movies was as good a way as any to pass the day, so I headed to Grindhouse, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's three-plus-hour gore-soaked double-feature magnum opus. It got great reviews when it came out, but no one went to see it. I didn't have time with school, otherwise I'd be first in line, but it still sold out the little art house theater that was still showing it this weekend.

The deal is that it's two movies for the price of one: Rodriguez's zombie flick "Planet Terror" and Tarantino's "slasher" flick "Death Proof." Since this is about zombies, I'll just mention that Tarantino's was totally bizarre -- a horror movie where almost nothing horrific happens. There are long, long stretches of dialogue before the few minutes of horror. I thought it was fun, but several people actually seemed offended by the lack of gore -- they stormed out during the dialogue, saying loudly "This is awful! Let's get out of here."

No one stormed out during the ultra-gruesome Planet Terror when zombie Bruce Willis's pus-filled face exploded. Seeing two zombie movies in the same day was an odd experience, particularly since the two were so similar. Both were about a "virus" rather than traditional zombies, both had major subplots about the military, and both include a scene where people realize that the best way to dispatch a whole mess of zombies at once is to use the blades of a helicopter. By the end of the day, I wondered how many heavily made-up extras I'd seen ripped apart during the course of the afternoon, but figured it was far too many to count.

I'd probably write something more clever about zombies if I weren't so tired and leaving for San Francisco in the morning. Pictures and stories from the City By the Bay next week!

Until then, I can't believe you actually read this far...

The end of movie critics

2007-05-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I dreamed of being a movie critic for a living. That was at least partly my motivation for applying for the arts writing program at Columbia. I realized that it was a long shot, since there aren't that many movie critics and it's a tough gig to get, but I thought maybe I'd luck into it somehow.

But in the past few months there has been story after story about newspapers eliminating their movie and TV critics and just running the Associated Press reviews, to save money. Because any review of a movie is just as good, and who cares what local people think about movies? It's just a waste of money to pay someone to sit in the dark and spout off afterwards, all you get is a diversity of views and a variety of interesting writing about an important part of popular culture.

This is the latest one to go down. (Not that I condone this guy's catty, if cryptic, attacks on Richard Roeper and A.O. Scott in the last graf, though his final line struck fear into my heart.) In about five years, you'll be able to count all the movie critics on one hand. Apparently, I was born a few decades too late if this was what I wanted to do.

More on this topic, for the truly bored (or the truly interested in the kind of thoughts that occupy my brain. I wrote an essay for arts and culture class on this topic.)

* The War Against Movie Critics from Salon
* In Defense of Film Critics from the Christian Science Monitor
* Variety editor Peter Bart (producer of Revenge of the Nerds II) suggests critics should no longer exist, because they don't like the same movies "regular people" do, such as Norbit and Wild Hogs.
* The Chicago Sun-Times' Jim Emerson explains why that is a stupid thing to say.
* A.O. Scott of the New York Times on why he's a critic, or to answer his detractors, " just who he thinks he is."
* A contrary opinion: E! Online says that all critics are self-important blowhard who hate fun, while sensible, normal people just want to see things blow up and the good guys win every time. Sigh.

My week in enemy territory

2007-05-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

"When I was a kid growing up in Boston, I always heard that if you wore a Red Sox hat in Yankee Stadium, you would be murdered. Later on, I moved to New York and I realized that wasn't true. You don't have to be wearing any special kind of hat to be murdered at Yankee Stadium." -- Conan O'Brien

After spending the last three nights at the Stadium proudly sporting my Sox hat and sustaining no bodily harm, I can confirm that Conan isn't exactly right. If you're a loudmouthed, drunken Sox fan who taunts the crowd of 55,000 Yanks fans and gives them the finger and other obscene gestures, however, you will at least be shouted down and cheered when you're ejected by security. Not that I was doing that, but I saw it happen more than I perhaps expected. Some Boston people are idiots, and not in the fun '04 World Series way. But if you behave yourself, you can have a lovely time even in the Evil Empire’s Death Star. Pictures are here.

Before this week, I had only been to one Sox-Yanks game in my life, and that was Game 4 of the '99 ALCS at Fenway. The Sox lost, falling behind in the series 3-1, and were eliminated the next night in New York. After a lousy phantom tag call, people threw stuff on the field for about 20 minutes, and the next day on SportsCenter, the anchors called the fans a national disgrace. At least I got to see the worst call by an umpire in history! Anyway, the only reason I got to go to that one was because my dad won tickets in a contest and thus became the top story on the local news. (This was the first time the teams had met in the playoffs, before it became a semi-regular occurrence, so it was a big deal.) I won’t embarrass him by recounting what he said on TV, but he won two tickets, and gave them to my brother and I. He didn't go to the game at all, watching it in a bar across the street from the stadium. (Thanks again, Dad!)

The point is that Sox-Yanks tickets in Boston are impossible to come by, like Fenway tickets as a whole. You're not allowed to simply buy tickets for games against New York, you have to enter your name in a lottery and if they pick you, you're allowed to open your wallet. Even for just a regular game at Fenway, you have to go on the internet the day tickets go on sale in January and spend hours on end in the "online waiting room" until they let you in to buy whatever's left. (That is how I acquired $12 nosebleed seats to a game against Detroit last August 14, and I only had to sit in front of my computer for nine hours!) Even with all the hoops you have to jump through, every game at Fenway has sold out for the last four years.

That was the mentality I had regarding baseball tickets in general until last week. I assumed that anywhere with a good team would have a similar rigmarole to go to a game, especially somewhere as passionate about sports as New York. Then I was messing around on the Yankees site the other day and thought “I’ll see if there are any tickets for when the Sox are in town in a few days, ha ha ha.” And there freakin’ were! For all three games! I was so dumbstruck, I just bought them right there, worried they were the last ones and I’d miss my chance. A few minutes later, I realized that was sorta dumb, because I’d end up going to all of the games by myself, but whatever.

After a 10-minute subway ride from my apartment on Monday, I was at Yankee Stadium. Not bad considering every game I’ve ever been to at Fenway involves two hours in a car from either Maine or Northampton, then a T ride to the stadium. I usually have to go after work because only weeknight games have tickets available, so I’d often be late. Going to Yankee Stadium was the easiest trip to a baseball game I’ve ever had, and only my fourth major league stadium (after Boston, Toronto and now-defunct Montreal).

My seats for all the games were $19, and for the first one I was right behind home plate. All right, so it was in the absolute last row of the upper deck, but it was still behind home plate. I have to say that Yankee Stadium really is nicer than Fenway -- there was actual leg room! And I could see the game without binoculars! Apparently it’s not nice enough for New York, since they’re building a new $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium across the street for some reason. One of my Yankee-fan classmates put it thusly, “We need a new stadium because we’re not making enough money.” Uh huh.

I’d always kind of figured that The Rivalry wasn’t quite as intense on the New York side, since they’ve usually won throughout history. But the level of hate for Boston appeared to be roughly equivalent in The Bronx, judging from the T-shirts on sale outside the stadium and on the fans. “New York -- 207 miles on I-95: The only sign of life in Boston.” “2090 -- Know your history.” (I’ll admit this one took me a second to figure out -- 2004+86 years until our supposed next championship.) “There was no curse, Boston just sucked for 86 years. Reverse that!” (Uh, we did thanks.) Lots of people had shirts celebrating last years “Boston Massacre” where the Yanks won 5 in a row at Fenway. Bully for them, but then they were quickly eliminated from the playoffs weeks later, so a lot of good it did them. Then there was the always classy “Bahston Sucks Cack.” (Not that there aren’t similar shirts at Fenway.)

In general, the mood in the stands was fairly cordial. I didn’t have anyone throw D batteries at my head or even comment on my hat, apart from other Sox fans. The people who seemed to get in trouble were the morons shouting at Yankees fans, even when the Sox were getting killed, like tonight. When the Sox were way behind tonight, it was a veritable circus in the upper deck, with people throwing things at Sox taunters and fans getting thrown out as early as the first inning. I prefer watching baseball to acting like a jackass, but that’s me.

On the subway home, I saw an old man get into a heated debate with a college-age girl in a Sox hat about how the Yankees were a better team because they’re fans didn’t behave like that. Right, had the game been at Fenway, there wouldn’t have been a single drunken Yankee fan causing trouble. Bastions of class and decency, Yankee fans.

This was an interesting exchange I witnessed. A group of rowdy college-girl Sox fans were chanting “Yankees Suck!” during game 2. A group of 30-ish Sex and the City-looking female Yankee fans turned and looked at them with disgust.

Yanks girls: You know you aren’t making a good impression for your team with that foul language.
Sox girls: Whatever, fuck you bitch.
Yanks girls (looking at the Sox girls’ sandals): Oh yeah? Why don’t you try getting a pedicure for once in your life. (Then they stormed out of the stadium).
Sox girls (cracking up): Did she just say ‘why don’t you get a pedicure” as a comeback?

I’ve had my fill of a handful of songs after going to three games in a row. “This is Why I’m Hot” played every time A-Rod got up to bat, and “New York, New York” played on a constant loop after every game (win or lose). They play the Darth Vader music when the Boston lineup is introduced and the heroic Star Wars music for the Yankees. This despite the face that Yankees fans wear shirts that say “Evil Empire” on them. (Embrace the Dark Side, Yankee brass.) And for some ridiculous reason, they play “Cotton Eyed Joe” in the eighth inning of every game, introduced by noted hayseed Roger Clemens. People really seem to get into that one, dancing all around the stadium, because they apparently think they’re at an early ‘90s middle school dance.

There were also actual baseball games to be played, but I presume you know the outcome if you care. While they weren’t the most exciting I’ve ever seen, they were entertaining enough. On Monday and Wednesday, the Yankees jumped out to an early lead and didn’t look back, on Tuesday the Sox did. There wasn’t a whole lot of drama in any of them, but I had a good time. And the Yankees are still 9.5 games back, so I can handle the two losses. Who knows when I’ll have the time, money and ability to go to three Sox-Yankees games in a row again?

People who complained that I don’t write enough on the blog, be careful what you wish for...

All right, everyone who's bugged me for not updating

2007-05-18T17:23:00.000-07:00

You know who you are. It was just pretty crazy the last few weeks of school and updating the blog was at the bottom of the list. But as of Wednesday afternoon, I am a graduate of the journalism school and don't yet have a job, so I've got nothing but time. For starters, I'm passing along some photos and videos of graduation. I don't have anything particularly clever to say about them right now, but I'll write more later.

My photos are on Flickr, check them out here. I didn't take a whole lot of pictures, actually, but you get the idea. 40,000-odd people crammed into the quad. It was a scene, man.

The graduation page on the J-school site has a photo of the entire class (I'm in the back row, under the "Founded by Joseph Pulitzer 1912" sign on the wall -- get out your magnifying glass) and audio of the addresses for the two J-school commencement ceremonies. You didn't even to fly to New York, you could have just watched it online!

Ditto the entire two-hour university commencement, which is online here, not that I recommend you watch the whole thing. It's at the bottom of the page, click on "University Commencement, Event Archive (Real Player)". The J-school gets its degrees at one hour, ten minutes and about 10 seconds in: 1:10:10, just skip RealPlayer ahead to that point and hear us drown out Nick Lemann's speech with chants of "J-school! J-school! J-school!"

There was a photo of the bleachers in the New York Times on Thursday, and if you squint, you could see my face in the crowd. Alas, it was just a photo and not an article, so it's not online. But you can read the story of J-school commencement from the Columbia newspaper here.

Here are two little videos I took from the bleachers during the commencement ceremony with my little $90 digital photo camera, which explains the quality. First is the procession, for anyone who's a Pomp and Circumstance junkie.

This is the grand finale, after degrees were awarded and they blasted an appropriate song over the PA system.

The J-school ceremony was held at the same time as Columbia Class Day, so we missed the address by this year's illustrious speaker. In the past it's been Tony Kushner and John McCain, this year we got...Matthew Fox, the star of Lost. After all the whining and complaining among students about having a TV star as a commencement speaker, I think his speech was very nice -- amusingly self-deprecating but also thoughtful and heartfelt. What else would you expect from Dr. Jack Shephard? I didn't shoot this video, but it was on YouTube.

More soon. I swear.

Opera is super-popular. Who knew?

2007-03-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

I like opera. Really. I've been to see Rigoletto in Central Park last summer, The Magic Flute at the Vienna Opera House, and the Barber of Seville in my high school gymnasium. It's fun, but I don't think I would tell people "I'm an opera fan." How often to do you run into anyone who says that, and who's not like a 60-year-old music professor with an ascot and pocket watch? Not often. So I was surprised to find out last night exactly how many New Yorkers are opera devotees.

It's spring break this week and my friend Liz (aka Lizmonster, reciter of pi to 179 places) asked me if I wanted to go with her to see The Barber of Seville at the Metropolitan Opera House. She'd never been to an opera before and wanted to check it out. So we looked for looked for tickets online and found out a) they're really expensive and b) they're completely sold out. Then we noticed the rush tickets service, where they sell a limited number of unsold tickets two hours before the show for $20.

I called the Met to see if they'd be doing the rush tickets for the Wednesday show, and they were. Then I asked what time I should get there, and the woman said "the show starts at 7:30 and tickets go on sale at 5:30, but people start lining up about two hours before that." Seriously? People wait in line for four hours for opera tickets? Liz and I found that impossible to believe, so we decided we would get there at 5 p.m. and try our luck.

When we arrived at Lincoln Center, everything looked calm. We walked into the lobby and saw the rush ticket window, and there was no one around. Sweet! Then a security guard walked up: "Can I help you folks?" We said we were just going to buy rush tickets, and he rolled his eyes. "Well, the line starts downstairs, but the chances are slim to none that you'll get in at this point."

Downstairs, we found a line stretching all they way through the basement, several people deep, winding around walls and out into the parking garage. It was crazy. The 4,000 seat theater was already sold out, these were the several hundred people on top of that who wanted to get tickets. We stood there for a few minutes before realizing it was pointless. Also, we were way underdressed, judging from the suited and evening-gowned crowd in front of us.

So we bailed. On the way out, Liz asked one group of people how long they'd been waiting and they said they got there at 3 p.m. and there were already 50 people in front of them. Moral of the story -- New Yorkers are every bit as cultured and high-falutin' as they're caricatured to be. Although if you really want people to come to the opera, it helps if it's one they can associate with Bugs Bunny, Seinfeld, and David Letterman.

We ended up seeing The Namesake at the Angelika, which was really good. And movies don't require an all-day commitment to waiting in line.

Mysterious

2007-03-11T17:59:00.000-07:00

I was attempting to look at my blog today, but I typed the URL incorrectly. Instead of "Ryan in J-school," I typed "Ryan in in J-school" -- and for some reason, got to this weird site:

"Abundant Bible -- A mega-site of Bible, Christian and religious information and studies. By God's mercy, one of the largest Bible-centered sites on the web (app. 6000 pgs). If it's in the Bible, it should be on this site."

What the? Why would the largest Bible site have a URL of ryanininjschool.blogspot.com? Who's Ryan? What's the J-school referring to (Jesus school?)? And what's with the two "in"s? It doesn't even look like a Blogger page. So strange.

At least I now have one-stop shopping for pearls of wisdom like this:

"If a person has on a pair of sunglasses called "lying," he may think all people lie at one time or another. If a person has on a pair of sunglasses called "adultery," he may think everyone commits adultery at some time in their life. If a person has on a pair of sunglasses called "rejection," many things that happen to him he will label as rejection, even though it is not true. He sees through a pair of red sunglasses called "rejection" that distort the truth."

UPDATE: 3-14-07

My classmate Bo has figured out what's going on. Very crafty. Well play, BlogPsot, Well played. From Bo's comments on the last post:

"Look at the url carefully, it is not blogspot.com, it is blogpsot.com The page you saw actually was the homepage of blogpsot. Whatever you put in front of blogpsot.com, it automatically directs to www.blogpsot.com. Technically, it is very easy to do that.It seems that you had two typos, apart from putting another "in," you also typed blogpsot instead of blogspot.so to be fair to the largest bible-centered sites, it is not a blogspot webpage, it has its own url!"

Apparently, I'm not the first to have had this problem.

Oscar post-mortem

2007-02-25T23:24:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about having a blog is that you can write things on it that people would tell you to shut up about if you actually tried to talk to them about, like how you did on your Oscar picks. Providing you don't fall asleep now out of sheer boredom, if you're looking at the blog, you're stuck with finding out how I did.

Of the 24 categories, I picked 14 correctly. That was good enough to squeak by in first place in the pool at my classmate's Oscar party, where two people had 13 correct,. As a result, I walked home through the snowstorm with a cool two dollars -- a 50 cent ante times four people. My Oscar dorkiness has some limits, so I don't save ballots from past years, but I believe that's right around or slightly below my yearly average, since I don‘t think I‘ve ever gotten less than half right.

In the major categories (picture, director, the four actors and two screenplays), I was seven for eight, picking Eddie Murphy over supporting actor winner Alan Arkin. I think Eddie should have won, but maybe those stupid "Norbit" ads really did hurt him. In general “think will win” picks corresponded well with who I wanted to win. Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Hudson and Scorsese were all great.

I’m happy The Departed won best picture, since the other two “front-runners,” Little Miss Sunshine and Babel, I didn’t care for. Babel was sort of dull and seemed like it thought it was making way more profound points than it was, and LMS was just vastly overrated. I can’t believe it was even nominated. It made me laugh, but I thought it was just a bad movie, a 90 minute sitcom spiced up with “edgy” material (a heroin-snorting grampa and a suicidal gay Proust scholar are quirky, but not good filmmaking). If it had won, which I’d heard predicted, I would have lost it.

I think I may have liked The Queen a bit more than The Departed (I’m the only one), but two of my favorite films weren’t nominated for best picture: United 93 and Dreamgirls -- too depressing and too frothy and joyous respectively, I guess.

I thought the show and Ellen were fun, if you can look past the stupid montages and dance numbers and other filler. One montage I missed the introduction to, and I couldn’t even tell what it was about -- there was shots of the Klan, Muhammad Ali, Saving Private Ryan...can anyone tell me what the heck that was? Anyway, I’m beyond judging the show on it’s merits -- it’s the Oscars, I’ll always watch it no matter what.

Last year, I managed to see every blessed movie in every blessed category, except for one of the foreign films which hadn't yet been released in the U.S., and the shorts, naturally. This year, with much less time but the advantage of living in New York, I was able to see 25 of the 43 nominated films, (minus the shorts). I actually saw all but four nominees in the major eight categories (for the record, I missed Volver, Notes on a Scandal, Pursuit of Happyness, and Children of Men). If you care.

And now, in the height of narcissism and navel-gazing, here’s the list of actual winners and how my picks matched up. I’m really doing this for my own amusement...I can’t imagine anyone would actually be interested.

*CORRECT* Best Picture: The Departed

*CORRECT* Best Actor: Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland

*CORRECT* Best Actress: Helen Mirren for The Queen

*INCORRECT* Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine (I picked Eddie Murphy)

*CORRECT* Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls

*CORRECT* Best Director: Martin Scorsese for The Departed

*CORRECT* Best Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine

*CORRECT* Best Adapted Screenplay: The Departed

*INCORRECT* Best Cinematography: Pan's Labyrinth (I picked Children of Men)

*INCORRECT* Best Editing: The Departed (I picked United 93)

*CORRECT* Best Art Direction: Pan's Labyrinth

*CORRECT* Best Costumes: Marie Antoinette

*INCORRECT* Best Score: Babel (I picked The Queen)

*INCORRECT* Best Original Song: An Inconvenient Truth, Melissa Etheridge("I Need To Wake Up") (I picked Beyonce's song from Dreamgirls...I guess three nominations in one category canceled each other out)

*CORRECT* Best Makeup: Pan's Labyrinth

*CORRECT* Best Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls

*CORRECT* Best Sound Editing: Letters from Iwo Jima

*CORRECT* Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

*INCORRECT* Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet (I picked Cars, which I really liked. I didn't
see Happy Feet, but I don't see how it could not be annoying)

*INCORRECT* Best Foreign Language Film: The Lives of Others (I picked Pan's Labyrinth, and given all the other awards it won, it's pretty shocking it didn't win here. But Lives of Others is great.)

*CORRECT* Best Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth

*INCORRECT* Best Documentary Short: The Blood of Yingzhou District

*INCORRECT* Best Animated Short: The Danish Poet

*INCORRECT* Best Live Action Short: West Bank Story (I'm not sure I've ever picked the shorts right, since I never see them...)

Phew. And now, I can get on with the rest of my life.

Oscar weekend...with an Oscar winner!

2007-02-24T14:17:00.000-08:00

Bear with some geeky backstory before I get to the geeky news. Last year around this time, I wrote a fluffy little story for the Gazette about a real-life Oscar statuette that's on display at the Smith College archives. It belonged to Nancy Hamilton, a 1930 Smith grad who won it in the Best Documentary category in 1956 for her film "Helen Keller in Her Story." Because I'm a total Oscar dork, I asked the photographer covering the story with me to take my picture with the statue (which didn't run in the paper, thankfully). The library made me wear gloves because all the gold plating was starting to wear off, but it was still awesome. As every winner says in the post-Oscar press conference it really is "much heavier than I expected! (At the bottom of this page, there is a photo of Helen Keller herself holding the same Oscar.)

The point of all that is to say that this year, I managed top that pre-Oscar close encounter by meeting (or at least being the presence of...) a real-life Oscar winner. And not some chintzy Best Editing winner no one's heard of, but the star of "Amadeus" and Best Actor winner for 1985, F. Murray Abraham!

"Murray," as those of us in the know call him, is starring in Broadway productions of those classics of Elizabethan anti-Semitism, "The Merchant of Venice" and "The Jew of Malta", both of which we saw for arts and culture class. ("Merchant" is excellent, "Malta" is performed as kind of a weird slapstick routine, but he's great in both.) After "Merchant" on Thursday, our professor arranged for us to meet up with the producer of the shows, Jeffrey Horowitz, at a bar across the street from the theater.

We had a really fascinating chat with Horowitz about the economics and politics of producing Shakespeare in New York. About halfway through, Murray happened to walk by and came over to talk to us for a few minutes. He recited some actor-y talking points about the magic of the theater ("the play you saw tonight will never be performed in exactly the same way again!") before heading off to meet his visiting son. Having just watched him for five hours over two plays, we were all appropriately star-struck. Here's a photo of him with Horowitz and our professor, Alisa Solomon (and my classmate Ann's hand holding the microphone).

Fellow Oscar fans, I say to you: top that! :) (Which you could do by meeting an Oscar winner who's been in a movie that anyone actually saw since getting the award, but no matter.)

More photos on our nascent class blog, including the whole lot of us in front of Keith Haring's famous (?) "Crack is Wack" mural in Harlem.

The Onion can read my mind

2007-02-24T10:11:00.000-08:00

The Onion is never funnier than when it's about something you've done yourself. For that reason, maybe no one else will like this story as much as I do, but I think it could actually have been about me in 2003.

Former Editor Can't Believe Shit College Newspaper Is Printing

(For the record -- http://www.colbyecho.com/ )

Air Hockey!

2007-02-06T17:26:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, my friend Kristen put an ad on Craigslist Boston looking for people to play air hockey with. A few people showed up the first time and she and her friends parlayed that into weekly air hockey sessions. The group started calling themselves Boston Air Hockey, since there weren't any other air hockey clubs in the city. Their motto: "Where even the winners are losers."

Once they began posting information online, this humble group of people who only kinda know how to play air hockey began sending shockwaves through the international air hockey community. Blogs as far away as Spain began talking up this new player on the air hockey scene. The beginning roughly translates as: "Boston, one more in the family. Only there is one more a more exciting thing for the air hockey explorer who to discover a new group of players: to see that it seems active and that it has future potential." (It's a pretty exclusive community.)

Word eventually got to Michael "Ricochet" Rosen, the U.S. Air Hockey Association's number-one-ranked player in New York, president of New York Air Hockey, and a former amateur air hockey world champion (according to his business card). He invited Kristen and company to Manhattan for a tournament against New York Air Hockey, which was held Saturday in a hole-in-the-wall bar in the East Village called Cheap Shots.

Never having been to an air hockey tournament before and wanting to show my New England pride, of course I went, decked out in a Red Sox hat and shirt (a few people came up to me and shouted "Go Yankees!"). It was way fun, and easily the most time I've spent thinking about air hockey in my life ever. Boston Air Hockey put on a good show, but the hard-core professionals from New York pretty much dominated.

They were really nice though, and so impressed that there was another upstart air hockey group. These guys really knew their air hockey -- like, referring to former world champions by their first names. I'm always interested to discover these unusual subcultures out there that no one knows about. And to support my friends' hilariously awesome hobbies.

Below are some pictures I took at the tourney. Here are some more from the official Boston Air Hockey site. (Note I'm not in the group shot because I don't play air hockey. Also, I was taking the picture.)

Kristen reacts to getting scored on.

Ricochet and James Scott Britton from Philadelphia in the final match.

Kristen and Gen talk shop with the New York guys.

The field of play.

Saco gets slammed

2007-02-01T09:53:00.000-08:00

This is a long way to go for not much of anything, but I'm always interested to see Saco, Maine mentioned anywhere, even if it's to get ripped apart by anonymous internet babblers. So here goes. The New York Times runs a column called The Ethicist, where people write in with their moral dilemmas. A few weeks ago, they ran this letter from someone in Saco with the unusual name of Clement Daly (it's the second letter...but read the first one, too. It's totally appalling.)

Gawker, the New York gossip site, runs their own response to the column every week because they think it's so stupid. They call it The Unethicist, and run the same letters with, you know, opposite advice. They ran this response to Clement Daly's letter (again, the first letter about snowflakes is totally worth reading).

The column prompted these response in the comments section, in which the posters totally shit on Saco.

Promises Malibu Barbie says:
I've been to Saco, Maine. Like those undocumented Persians, most of the townspeople are inbred. There are good reasons why the state serves as inspiration for Stephen King.

JupiterPluvius says:
There are four or five different Clement families in Saco, according to Google. How I love rural New England, where, as Promises Malibu Barbie says, everyone's as inbred as a kitten-mill cat.

This is probably the most prominent forum in which Saco has ever been discussed. I'm so proud.

New movie review

2007-01-31T15:12:00.000-08:00

This may seem like blog filler. You're probably right, but here it is anyway. My latest review for film criticism class is about the German nominee for the best foriegn film Oscar. Next week: Puccini for Beginners, a silly, lightweight lesbian romantic comedy that I thought was funny and enjoyable, but everyone else in class *hated*. Enjoy.

***

Captain Wiesler's emotionless mask of a face seemingly tells us everything we need to know. As yet another suspected subversive is brought before him, the East German State Security officer coolly prepares to inflict the inevitable hours of psychological torture that will follow. The young man pleads that he has done nothing wrong, but Wiesler tells him, entirely without irony, that "if you believe we arrest people on a whim, that alone is enough to justify your arrest."

The Lives of Others, the feature debut of German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, introduces its main character in bravura fashion. The questioning of the young man is intercut with a lecture Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) gives at a college, using audiotape of the suspect's whimpering collapse to illustrate proper interrogation technique. When one man in the classroom complains that what is being done is "inhuman," Wiesler discreetly puts a damning mark next to the student's name.

Quite simply, Wiesler appears to be more machine than man, the living embodiment of the declared goal of the State Security Ministry, or Stasi: "To know everything." Yet Muhe's expertly textured performance shows that life in a all-powerful police state can take a profound toll on those in power, as well the people they control.

Set (perhaps not coincidentally) in 1984, the film masterfully recreates the fear and oppression that pervaded life in Communist East Germany. No one is exempt from suspicion and widespread wiretapping means that no one's life is really their own. Bloated, corrupt bureaucrats divide their time between squelching every individual freedom and denying that any such thing could happen in their worker's paradise. Even scenes that don't deal directly with state control still carry a dark air of lurking menace, reinforced by the bleak grey winter setting.

The evocatively titled The Lives of Others follows Wiesler as he is reassigned from the interrogation chamber to a surveillance mission directed at playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his beautiful actress girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Although Dreyman is outwardly supportive of the regime (he’s hailed as "our only non-subversive writer" by one Party official), his association with a blacklisted director makes him suspect.

Once agents enter Dreyman's apartment and, in a chilling, wordless sequence filled with dramatic swells of music, bugs every square inch of it, Wiesler's job is to listen to everything the couple does and says every hour of the day.

At first, Wiesler’s cold stare betrays nothing of his thoughts as he sits wearing headphones and listening to the minutiae of everyday life (although the lingering shots confirm that Muhe bears an uncanny resemblance to Kevin Spacey). But soon, two things become clear that challenge his convictions.

Dreyman is indeed engaged in “subversive” activities -- he is secretly writing an article for a West German magazine about the East’s appalling rate of suicide, which claimed his blacklisted friend. But at the same time, Wiesler realizes that he has come to care for his quarry far more than he expected. The exact moment when Wiesler makes the shift from the couple’s unseen tormentor to their equally invisible protector is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. But after that, there is no going back.

Ensconced in his surveillance post, Wiesler repeatedly puts his own neck on the line to help Dreyman and Sieland avoid suspicion, all without them ever knowing who he is, or that they are under surveillance. Even with expert help from the inside, however, the tentacles of the police state prove difficult to escape.

The film belongs to Muhe, who conveys Wiesler’s utter transformation from heartless party functionary to stalwart force for good with only minimal dialogue, using his eyes and expression to tell the story. On paper, such a drastic change in character may ring false and unbelievable, but Muhe pulls it off with aplomb.

As Dreyman, a thoroughly decent man caught in impossible circumstances, Koch provides an genial moral center for the film, managing not to be beaten down by oppressive forces until they become overpowering.

Gedeck has the difficult role Christa-Maria, who alternates between heartbreaking loyalty to Dreyman and self-destructive fear of the government. The strength of her performance is evident in a late scene where Christa-Marie is given a choice between doing the right thing and saving herself. The audience knows she could go either way, and her consideration of the question is agonizing.

Henckel von Donnersmarck’s direction skillfully maintains suspense throughout the 2 hour and 20 minute film by emphasizing the potential threat to the characters from several angles. We worry first that Dreyman will be turned in by Wiesler for subversion, then that Wiesler will be found out for helping Dreyman, then that the whole scheme will collapse under its own weight.
When there’s endless danger, there are endless opportunities for drama, and even if some of the characters and subplots in the middle of the film feel extraneous, they don’t distract from the story, which ends satisfyingly with a coda set after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

According to a May 2006 story in the Boston Globe, the fictional film caused a political commotion in Germany when it was released. Up to that point, the Stasi surveillance and the totalitarian Communist regime had almost never been publicly discussed in the country before that, either in popular culture or politics.

“It's forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis,” German historian Hubertus Knabe says in the article. “But it's almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison."

The Lives of Others was credited with opening a dialogue and counteracting a movemen by former Stasi officers who had been trying to rehabilitate their image, claiming that everything they did was to protect the country from its enemies. The film was a box-office success in Germany, won seven German Film Awards, and now has a chance to add an Oscar, as one of this year’s very deserving nominees for best foreign language film.

Royalty in Harlem

2007-01-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

Prince Charles visited my neighborhood today. (I was holed up in the library all day). That is all.

My first review for class

2007-01-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

This is the first review I wrote my film criticism class, about director Anthony Minghella's new film Breaking and Entering, if anyone is interested in reading it. Today's movie, and next week's review, is the German nominee for the best foreign film Oscar, The Lives of Others.

For now, back to the thesis. *sigh*

***

Writer-director Anthony Minghella's three previous films were based on novels that among them had won an Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Award. Perhaps emboldened by his success at transforming classy books into classy films (which earned him Best Screenplay Oscar nominations for The Talented Mr. Ripley and The English Patient), Minghella strikes out on his own with an original screenplay for his new film Breaking and Entering, but proves that perhaps he should stick with the high-toned literary fiction for inspiration.

A departure from the grand scale of several of his previous films, including Cold Mountain in 2003, Breaking and Entering is decidedly small-time, with a plot that would barely support an hour-long TV drama, never mind a two-hour film. In brief: successful architect Jude Law mounts his own investigation into a series of break-ins at his London office, tracks the teenage suspect home and complicates matters by falling for the young man's lonely, wounded mother (Juliette Binoche), while hiding the affair from his long-time partner (Robin Wright Penn). That's about the gist of the story, at once simple and artificial. The film proceeds pretty much exactly you'd expect from that outline, but is larded with so many misguided subplots and big ideas introduced and left dangling that it gives the impression of a short-story collection tossed in a blender.

For starters, the young thief and his mother are refugees from Bosnia, with Binoche's character struggling with the trauma of the war a decade later and the son having fallen in with a poorly-sketched gang led by his family's criminal side. Law's architect is working on a project to revitalize the blighted King's Cross neighborhood where his office is located, prompting many comments that he's made himself a target for crime. Law and Penn bicker over their stalled, decade-long relationship which has yet to result in marriage, and about his alternately warm and cold relationship with Penn's autistic teenage daughter (Poppy Rogers). None of these issues are treated with insight beyond mere platitudes, and few result in any dramatic payoff, since there's no real need for the characters to be Bosnian, autistic, or building a socially controversial project. The details seem designed mostly to prop up the flimsy plot by referencing Important Issues, rather than to move the story along. And I haven't even mentioned the suspicions cast on the office's Carribean cleaning staff after the robbery, the infatuation Law's business partner has with one of the cleaners, a farcical but chaste but encounter with a local prostitute, or the mystifyingly symbolic fox howling in Law's garden. The film shifts gears so often, it should probably have its transmission checked.

Despite having so much going on, it never feels as though there is much of anything at stake in the film. The young burglar's bleak future should he be arrested is unconvincingly discussed several times in what ends up amounting to a central theme, but the question of why we should care about any of these people hangs over the film. An odd sense of pacing doesn't help matters, with major characters dropping out of sight for long stretches of time, only to re-emerge and become less interesting.

All of the narrative clutter would be annoying, but not fatal, if the central storyline was able to build momentum and interest. Unfortunately, the Law-Binoche romance is not only hopelessly contrived, but even baffling. Law chances across Binoche's character on the street (he gives her a towel after she falls in a puddle) shortly before he discovers her son is behind the titular crime. When he scopes out the apartment on the pretense of taking advantage of her home seamstress operation, there's little to suggest he's interested in anything another than finding evidence against her son -- until he kisses her and the film veers off into another direction, where it will remain mired for the rest of its running time. The reason for their attraction is never made clear, apart from rudimentary suggestions that Law's relationship with his girlfriend is on the rocks and Binoche is a beautiful immigrant abroad without a man. Such whisper-thin ideas are hardly enough on which to support an entire film, but that's what Breaking and Entering tries to do. The truth of the story is tough to swallow as it is, but when Law later concocts an even more convoluted fictional version of events in court late in the film, a lawyer speaks for the audience by exclaiming, "Are we supposed to believe this?"

Throughout the film, Law (in his third collaboration with Minghella) is something of a cipher, pleasantly babbling in his foppish Hugh Grant manner while utterly masking the character's real feelings and motivation. How does he feel about his cross-cultural affair, his ostensibly high-minded but potentially problematic community development project, or even his sweet but difficult stepdaughter? If we have any idea, it's mostly guesswork, since Law's unchanging demeanor (and Minghella's script) betrays almost none of the character's thought process. He could be a cad, or well-meaning but confused, or some combination thereof, but mostly he's mysterious, and not in a good way. If only in contrast, Binoche and Penn fare somewhat better, embodying thanklessly limited roles with more believability and charisma that Law is able to provide.

Absent the words of authors like Patricia Highsmith and Charles Frazier to work from, Minghella's screenplay is almost comically clunky. "I don't know how to be honest. I guess that's why I like metaphors, " Law says (really) in one climactic scene. This after painstakingly explaining the concept of the metaphor in earlier scenes to his literal-minded stepdaughter, whose autism prevents her from understanding terms like "fed up." For a script so seemingly concerned with literary devices, it never once displays confidence that the viewer is capable of understanding them. And yet, the film is mistakenly confident that audiences have a desire to see a standard adultery plot recycled once again, with little to distinguish it besides the names on the marquee.

The science of procrastination

2007-01-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

While immersed in one of my usual procrastination binges, I came across this article about why people procrastinate. Very meta. Is reading scientific research about why people procastinate a form of procrastination? I submit that it is not, provided one makes use of it to avoid procrastinating. To wit, I'm hoping that by posting it here, I shall will myself into doing work by forcing quotes like this into my brain:

"On the one hand, it's easy to trivialize procrastination. We joke about it," says Timothy A. Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University who studies procrastination.

"But procrastination is self-defeating. It's a breakdown in volitional action. I have an intention and I'm not following through on it. You're not able to follow through on what you want to do."

There's a handy-dandy formula at the bottom of the story that illustrates the optimum conditions for procastination, and certainly rings true. Now, back to work. Right?!?

Another class with my name on it

2007-01-17T10:31:00.001-08:00

Today I was joined by four of my J-school classmates in scoping out the “TV as Dramatic Medium” class in the film school. I think we were all sold within the first few minutes, when the professor said “This is a class for people who LOVE TV. If you don’t really like TV, or you’re skeptical about it, that’s fine, but you’re in the wrong class.” The idea is to study TV as an art form in terms of plot and character development, and how the shows are created and written, the same way film is studied seriously.

The syllabus she handed out includes a long list of 16 shows we’ll be discussing and TV as an art form, from The West Wing to Deadwood to Scrubs. Actually, a lot of these shows I haven’t seen, but now I’ve got an excuse: I’ve got to watch them for class! Between this class and the film criticism one discussed below, this is going to be quite the semester. Studying TV and movies for school…oh man, so psyched. (Kate, C, and my other fellow entertainment-obsessives: if you ever happen to be in New York on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. or a Wednesday at 10 a.m., maybe you could sit in!)

Too bad I didn’t bring my TV with me to New York, on the premise I’d be too busy to watch TV, but my I guess my Netflix account is going to get a workout. Right after class, one of my friends signed up for Netflix for the purposes of the class, and I got to watch her face as she discovered the marvels of the site for the first time: “They’ve got everything! This is like Christmas!” Sweet.

Getting ready for Sunday's game

2007-01-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

Today the Globe considers the question of "Just how devastating would an Adam Vinatieri game-winner be for the Patriots?" I think the less time I spend thinking about the former New England hero kicking for the Colts, the better, but I found their scenario pretty funny:

Adam Vinatieri has never missed in the RCA Dome.

Never missed.

You just know that has to be a source of concern for them this week, a potentially devastating regional nightmare if he were to be the one to vault the Colts into the Super Bowl with a game-winning kick.

If it comes down to a Vinatieri kick this time around, perhaps the only way Indy fans don't go home happy is if Vinatieri is pulling a setup with Belichick, simultaneously shanking the kick wide right and tearing off his Colts jersey to reveal Pat Patriot on his chest, the greatest undercover gag ever.

Back to class (and the blog)

2007-01-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

To bookend things with my last post, which was on the night before the last day of the first semester, I thought I’d write today, the night of the first day of the second semester. What have I been up to for the last month? Less than I can really believe. I went home to Maine for about a week and a half between Christmas and New Years, where I spent a lot of time with my family and relatively little else. On New Years Eve, my friends and I went to L.L. Bean! Since they never close (they say the doors don’t have locks) they hosted the only free New Years event I could find in Maine. It was very…Maine-y. Down East comedian Tim Sample was the MC for the thing, which was held outdoors in the freezing cold next to a big statue of a boot. They apparently couldn’t get fireworks for some reason, so at midnight, so they showed pictures of fireworks on big screens and played fireworks sound effects. Woo! Maine!

I came back to New York on Jan. 2, ostensibly to get down to brass tacks working on my thesis. I did some interviews and wrote up my notes, but a lot of time was spent staring at my computer screen thinking about how I’m ever going to write 10,000 words, as unproductive hours sped by at a rapid pace. I’ve still got two weeks before the rough draft is due, so I’m counting on my ability to respond well to deadline pressure and get things done in the clutch (although right now, I’m writing this blog before going to an J-school welcome back party, so coming through in the clutch will have to wait for now…) That skill did serve me well in the first semester. (One of the stories I wrote, about an exhibition of art made out of Tupperware, was conceived at about 6 p.m. the night before it was due. I went to the exhibit at 7 p.m., stayed until 9 p.m. or so, then went back and wrote it until 1 a.m. I’d lost all ability to tell if it was any good at that point, but my professor really liked it. Which led to me doing the same thing, in a less rushed fashion, on other assignments.)

With memories of my insanely busy first semester schedule still in my mind, I decided to take last weekend to do something completely ridiculous and frivolous while I still could. I went all the way to my relatives’ house in Springfield, Mass. and back in one day, just to watch the Patriots came. My cousin suggested it, and while ordinarily that would seem like a totally crazy thing to do, I took her up on it. Travel time considerably exceeded the length of the game, but it was worth it to see the awesome and to get out of town for probably the last time until graduation in May. I left my apt. at 10 a.m., took the 11 a.m. train from Grand Central, and got to New Haven at 1 p.m., where my cousin (seen below in the massage chair) picked me up and drove the hour to Springfield. The game started at 4:30 p.m. and ended at 8 p.m., whereupon the entire maneuver started again, getting me home at 1 a.m. Like I said, silly, but surprisingly fun.

A class with my name on it

2007-01-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

For the second semester, we’re required to take two classes outside the journalism school, and I think I’ve found two good ones. Number one: “TV as Dramatic Medium” (which starts tomorrow.) Number two: “Writing Film Criticism.” Woot! I sat in on the film criticism class today, and it was unusual, to say the least. The professor is Andrew Sarris, the film critic for the New York Observer, who’s 78 years old and had previously written for the Village Voice since 1960. He’s rambly and funny and said things like “I’m on my last legs” and “I don’t want to teach this course, but they make me.”

But it seems like it’ll be fun. Every week in class, we just watch whatever movie he’ll be reviewing for the paper, then talk about it and write our own reviews for next week. I’m not sure how much I’ll actually *learn* doing this, but since I pretty much came to Columbia with the intention of one day being a movie critic, I don’t think I can pass that up. Also we get to see movies no one else has seen yet -- today we watched Anthony Minghella’s new film “Breaking and Entering” with Jude Law and Juliette Binoche. It was pretty lame – very simplistic adultery plot adorned with lots of “big ideas” that go nowhere – but I think I’ll be fun to write about. If I stick with the class, I’ll post my reviews on the blog.

Christmas on YouTube

2006-12-13T18:41:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is my last day of class for the semester, and I don't feel motivated to accomplish much of anything. So I'm finding some of my favorite Christmas stuff on YouTube! At the Gazette, I wrote silly articles every year for the holiday supplement about Christmas things that I like -- one year it was movies and TV specials, one year it was songs, etc. For the most part, I hadn't seen or heard any of the things I was writing about for a while, so it was based on memory. That, of course, was pre-YouTube -- now all of it is online, which rules. Enjoy!

* Charlie Brown, the Grinch and Rudolph are great, but for my money, there's no topping A Muppet Family Christmas from 1987. The Muppet Show characters, the Sesame Street gang, the Fraggles and even Jim Henson get together for Christmas Eve at Fozzie's mom's house. It's funny to see the characters interact for the first time...for instance, the Swedish Chef is looking for a turkey and meets Big Bird. They never ever show this on TV any more, but some thoughtful person has posted the whole thing on YouTube in several parts. Huzzah! Part one is at the link above, you can find the others from that page.

* Best dancing in a Christmas special: The Peanuts kids, of course.

* I love that "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" has kind of become an unofficial Christmas song. There aren't enough carols that talk about unwashed socks and sauerkraut and toadstool sandwiches. I couldn't find a clip from the show, but here's the song synced to someone's light display. If you don't like it, the three words that best describe you are as follows (and I quote) "stink, stank, stunk."

* (The lights in that video aren't that good, but luckily there's also this guy's video: the craziest, awesomest light display ever. You've probably already seen it all over the internet or in a beer commercial last year, but it's worth seeing again. The true story of the guy who made it is here.)

* On the subject of the Grinch, here are some other bad-guy characters who steal a holiday special, the "Riverbottom Nightmare Band!" from Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas. They certainly even out the schmaltz (and make up for the amazingly cheapo Muppeteering) from the rest of the show, and you gotta love the snake guitarist.

* MTV hasn't played any videos since 1997, but thankfully YouTube has all the best Christmas pop songs. Like All I Want For Christmas is You, by Mariah Carey -- I wouldn't consider myself a much of a Mariah fan, but I absolutely love this song. I don't know why exactly, since it's totally syrupy and silly, but it's just so overwhelmingly cheerful and spirited I can't resist.

* Christmas in Hollis, by Run DMC: In the very limited subgenre of Christmas rap songs, Rev. Run and company take the cake hands down. Also it's the only holiday song to mention macaroni and cheese.

* Here's something pretty cool -- an album of Christmas song played by hard-rock guitarist Gary Hoey. Who would have thought you could rip it up on "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlement"? The Amazon page for the album has samples of all the songs (which is probably enough).

* And finally, Bruce Springsteen playing Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. Great stuff.

Wow, that wasted some time. Anything I missed?

Turkey Day in the Big Apple

2006-11-26T16:17:00.000-08:00

So I didn't have to fly home twice in less than a month, my family came to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving this year. It was great, even if the weather didn't cooperate. The weather on Thursday was among the worst we've had since I moved here: 40 degrees and pouring rain with high winds. If you watched parade on TV, you saw what it was like. Rather than stand in line freezing to death for hours to see inflatable Big Bird for 30 seconds, we scotched the parade, missing our chance to finally see something that we've watched on TV every single year of my life. We did happen to pass through Times Square just as it was ending, so we saw Garfield's butt from several blocks away.

On Wednesday night, before my family got here, I went to the inflating of the balloons at the Museum of Natural History, so I got my chance to commune with Super Grover and Dora the Explorer -- the balloons aren't as big as you might think. Anyway, I think I'm all set on going to the actual parade from now on. Going to the inflation, you see all the balloons in about 20 minutes, with no waiting, no inane Today Show patter, and no crappy pop star musical performances. I forgot to bring my camera to the inflation, so this photo from the Times will have to suffice.

The parade was out, so our large contingent (my parents and brother, along with aunt, uncle and cousin Kate) had to find other ways to amuse ourselves. We braved the rain to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree (again, not as big as I'd imagined) and David Blaine. He was in the midst of his latest dumb stunt: if he escaped from a gyroscope dangling from a crane before the stores opened on "Black Friday," Target would give needy children a shopping spree! Great corporate synergy! I did have my camera for that, so here you go. He actually escaped -- and fell through the plywood stage and was taken to the hospital -- about an hour after we were there.

After all that time in the rain, we went to Brookstone, the one store we could find that was open on Thanksgiving, just to warm up. Here's a picture of me, Kate and my Uncle Joe (in the red hat) flagrantly violating the time limit for trying out the $4,000 massage chairs.

After that, it was time for a not-quite-traditional Thanksgiving dinner at a 50s themed diner where all the waitresses sing showtunes. Ellen's Stardust Diner may not be exactly Norman Rockwell (I think only my mom actually had turkey), but it was definitely American. The singers were really pretty good, but they walked around the restaurant belting out Little Mermaid songs and stopping at tables, waiting for you to...I don't know what. We mostly felt embarrassed for them and looked down at our food. One waiter waltzed passed and got right in my dad's face to sing "Que Sera Sera." I thought my brother would die laughing. More below...

Turkey Day in the Big Apple, Part II

2006-11-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

That night, we went to see the new James Bond movie, partly because it was something we could all agree on, and partly because my dad is fanatically obsessed with Bond movies. He's seen all 21 of them multiple times, and has been asking me "When is the new Bond coming out?" since approximately five minutes after we saw "Die Another Day" on Thanksgiving 2002. This new one was quite good -- Daniel Craig was great in the role, and it wasn't nearly as preposterous as the Brosnan movies (no invisible car, in other words). My dad loved it, if a connoisseur’s opinion means something to you.

The next day, we went to Ground Zero, since neither my parents or brother had been (my parents were last in New York maybe 10 years ago, and Pat had only been to the city for a day or two for work last year). After that, we went on a “food tour” of Greenwich Village, where our guide talked about the history of the neighborhood and stopped to sample various cheese-based goodies. Seriously, everything we ate had some kind of cheese in it, except the chocolate -- two types of pizza, cannoli, some kind of cheese ball, and a cheese plate from Murray’s Cheese Shop. I’m certainly not complaining.

One of the neatest things on the tour was a stop at a speakeasy, which is still running after 60 years and looks exactly as it did during Prohibition. Chumley's is a little hole-in-the-wall place with no signs or markers that you need to walk through a courtyard to get through. The walls are plastered with signed photos of all the famous writers that used to drink there, which is pretty much all the famous writers. We didn’t actually eat anything, but now I can say I’ve been to a speakeasy. The one, in fact, where the term "86" was invented -- it's at 86 Bedford Street. (Kristen: the idea of visiting a working speakeasy strikes me as the kind of thing you’d find highly amusing. Let me know if I’m right.)

Oh, and we saw the apartment building where Monica and Rachel lived on Friends. I'm not nearly a big enough fan to recognize it from the show, but Kate knew it instantly.

All in all, it was a way fun holiday. Certainly more interesting than eating and falling asleep watching football games I barely have an interest in.

Strange Chance Encounter

2006-11-13T14:39:00.000-08:00

For the four years I worked at the Gazette, I sat about 10 feet away from a guy named Dan DeNicola, who writes the weekend calendar listings. In that four years, I don't think I ever said anything more to him than hello. In fact, I don't think anyone did. The only people I ever saw him talking to were his editor asking if the calendar was finished and the tech support people, whom he seemed to call on frequently. Not that I had anything against him, but he just radiated this odd kind of "don't talk to me" vibe. Probably had something to do with having the most mind-numbing job in the editorial department.

So yesterday I was on the subway, and who sits down next to me but Dan DeNicola and his wife. We went through the whole hey, how are you, what are you doing in New York thing, then he asked about Columbia, etc. It turned out he was in the city to visit his wife, who lives there. For the whole 20 years they've been married, he's lived in Northampton and she's lived on the Upper West Side -- he works at the Gazette during the week then goes to see her on the weekends. Twenty years! Told you he was odd.

Anyway, the fairly normal conversation I had with him over the course of five subway stops was far and away the longest I'd ever spoken with him, even after four years of his face being directly in my field of vision every day for eight hours a day. I asked how things were going at the Gazette, and he said the paper had been sold...which of course happened well over a year ago, and I only left at the end of the summer. Anyway, he said he'd tell people at the Gazette I said hi, but I realized he might not actually know my name. ("I saw that tall kid with glasses on the subway.")

Whenever I'm in a big crowded city, I always have this kind of notion/hope feeling in the back of my mind that I'll run into someone I know from long ago and we'll reconnect it'll be this whole fun, memorable experience. Instead, I run into people I barely know and have to awkwardly come up with things to say to them. Who knows what kind of random person I'll run into next? Someone I worked with at the amusement park in high school? The parent of a kid I interviewed about gingerbread houses? The possibilities are endless.

Visiting the Old Gray Lady

2006-11-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

When I was in 8th grade, my science teacher signed my yearbook by writing "I'll be looking for your byline in the New York Times someday." I got some similar sentiments in congratulatory cards when I graduated from Colby. I don't have a particular desire to work at the notoriously hypercompetive and stressful NYT, but y'know, I wouldn't turn them down. Today I got my first chance to visit what people seem to jokingly think of as my destiny when I went on a tour of the Times building in (where else?) Times Square.

The trip was arranged by my classmate Sugi, who teaches journalism to high school girls at the Asian American Writers Workshop, and invited the rest of our arts seminar at Columbia to come along. Besides finding time to teach a class outside of J-School, Sugi is one of the people discussed in a post below who has a way more impressive resume than me. She graduated from Harvard the same year I graduated from Colby, was hired by the Atlantic Monthly right out of school, then wrote for the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education, before getting a degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. A few days ago, she signed a two-book deal with Random House to publish her novels. To reiterate: I covered the school board.

Anyway, Sugi is friends with Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, who led the tour. (Yes, that's the number 8 in her name. You may have come across her "Man Date" story, which was one of the NYT's most emailed for a long time last year.) She was really great and had some fun stories about her experiences, but as she talked, I realized that working at the Times didn't sound all that different from working at the Gazette. The deadlines, getting called out to cover such-and-such at the last minute, having editors chop up your stories, etc.

I don't know what I expected her to say. Being a reporter for the Times seems so glamorous, but I guess the "reporter" part of the job description seems to be pretty much the same everywhere. Same with the office itself -- completely indistinguishable from the newsroom at the Gazette or anywhere else, with desks and papers and computers. The only major difference: the long, long hallway with pictures of every Pulitzer winner from the Times.

Last word on Election '06

2006-11-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

Don't worry, this isn't turning into a politics blog. Just thought this cartoon was great.

Oddball News from my Neighborhood

2006-11-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

Someone stole George Washington's head! I walk by here everyday, but I didn't notice this until I saw it in the paper. Shades of Jebediah Springfield on the Simpsons.

Unsolicited career advice

2006-10-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

For one of my classes, we were assigned to stand near an ATM machine for four hours and watch the people who use it. Why, you ask? I'm not entirely sure, but it has something to do with observation skills, I guess. Or maybe the professors just want to see what they can get us to do in order to get a free Ivy League master's degree. Winter assignment -- c'mon, just lick the frozen lamp post! Nothing will happen!

Anyway, I was standing on the street corner watching my ATM this afternoon. At about the 90 minute mark, a guy walked by pushing a shopping cart full of styrofoam coolers. He was kinda short and beefy and was wearing a sweat suit and a white yarmulke. He stopped and looked at me, then started the following conversation out of the blue.

Him: What are you, like 27?
Me (startled): Um, yeah.
Him: What do you do?
Me: Uh, I'm a student at Columbia. Why do you ask?
Him: I'm just curious. What are you studying?
Me (this is getting weird): Journalism.
Him: Ahhh. Your dream -- your dream is to be a reporter? (I nod). I wrote a story and sold it to the newspaper once. It was on the front page. Let me tell you something, you need to stop wasting your time. Working for someone else, you'll never get anywhere. You need to come up with a story that you think is a front page story, go out and write it and sell it to the newspaper. They'll buy it. Okay? Stop wasting your time.

And then he left, pushing his coolers. Maybe I'm just too much of a New York newbie, but I'm consistently amazed by the number of weird people around. This guy didn't even seem that crazy. He just honestly wanted to give me his unsolicited career advice.

By the way, what did I observe by standing there? Uh, lots of people use the ATM. And occasionally someone will leave their card in it when they walk away, and it'll get eaten.

Oh right, I have a blog...

2006-10-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

The "J School" part of the ryaninjschool blog has been woefully anemic since my classes started. If you've been checking the site religiously to discover what it's like to attend journalism school, my apologies. Both for not posting, and that reading this thing is the most interesting thing you can come up with to do... :)

So, it's been pretty hectic now that class has started and I've needed to get back into the whole homework thing, after four years removed from it. All my classes look like they'll be really interesting, albeit with a LOT of reading. Along the lines of, "For next class, three days from now, read this entire book along with a good several dozen pages of dense theory." But I'm sure it will be fine, and besides it's not like I have any money to be doing much besides reading for hours at a time.

A bunch of people have asked what classes one takes in journalism school, so for anyone interested, here's a list. Everyone in my program takes Evidence and Inference (about doing research, making stories as accurate as possible, and not getting swayed by sources or personal biases) and History of Journalism for Journalists (the name says it all). I'm also taking one class dedicated to arts and culture writing (for which I've already gone to a Korean Film Festival and an exhibit on Dadaism at the Museum of Modern Art) and a course outside the J-school in 20th Century American Theater. On top of that, there's a 50-page master's thesis due in May. Now you know.

The application materials for the M.A. program I'm in said something along the lines of "applicants must dedicate an outstanding record of professional achievement" in order to be admitted. I was thinking that covering the school board and kids making gingerbread houses for four years was probably not what they were after, but I got in, so I guess I was doing something right. The fact that I was accepted made me think that the "outstanding achievement" they were looking for had less to do with an impressive resume than I had worried about. However, the resumes of my classmates pretty much fall in line with what I thought in the beginning, when I thought no one who wrote about middle school food fights would get in.

An partial list of where some of the other 32 people in the program worked last year:

Wall Street Journal
Newsweek (three people!)
San Francisco Chronicle
Times of India
China Daily
Slate
Reuters London Bureau

There are a few people from non-world-famous publications, but no one from anywhere as tiny as the Daily Hampshire Gazette. So I feel pretty lucky to be here. However, there are three former Gazette people that I know (two interns and one of my fellow reporters) in the other program at the J-school, so I guess we're impressing someone.

Another question people like to ask is "what's your roommate like?" I have to be honest -- I really don't know. I hardly ever see him or talk to him, even though he's usually here closed up in his room. The other day we had an actual five-minute conversation, the first time we'd said more than Hi to each other in a few weeks. But that's fine -- I'd rather live with someone a little odd and quiet than loud and obnoxious.

Truth, Justice, All that Stuff

2006-10-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

At the end of the summer, I went to Six Flags New England, finally using the free passes I'd won at the office Christmas party eight months earlier. Stupidly, I wore my T-shirt into the water park, then it cooled off and I was freezing. So I bought a Superman T-shirt at the gift shop to change into.

It's just the standard blue shirt with the "S" logo on the front. I've seen people wearing them all over the place, so it didn't strike me as particulary unusual or amusing. But apparently, the Superman shirt really strikes a chord with people in New York.

I wore it the other day and no less than four people on the street called out comments about it. An old man walked by and said "Hey, Superman! Can you fly, Superman?" Two little kids stopped playing when I walked by and looked to be in awe. "It's Superman!" they said, exchanging glances with each other. Even a homeless guy in a wheelchair called out from across the street, "Superman! Superman! Superman! Got any change for the bus, Superman?"

I'm at a loss to explain this reaction. I don't think any of these people were making fun of me for wearing a goofy shirt, they just genuinely seemed interested in my $15 purchase. I am a mild-mannered reporter who's somewhat awkward, and do have dark hair and glasses, but no one was calling out "Hey, Clark Kent!"

Suggested explanations welcome.

I still exist...

2006-10-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

So it's been over a month since the last time I updated this thing. Where have I been? Here:

My apartment:

The Journalism School:

The Columbia Campus:

More to come soon....

Meeting the Met

2006-08-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

I spent the day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday, quite literally. I got there shortly after it opened and stayed until they shuffled everyone out at closing time seven hours later. I think I saw maybe, maybe! a fifth of the exhibits -- the place is ginormous (BTW, I'm not usually a fan of neologisms that come from slang, but I think we need to go ahead and make ginormous a real word).

Every time I would walk to what I thought was the end of, say, the modern art wing, I'd turn a corner and find I was only at the midway point. And that the exhibit continued upstairs. It was quite incredible. I stuck with things I knew something about, so I missed out on ancient Sumarian coins or whatever, but still it was fun.

One thing I noticed in the museum that I don't recall seeing very often in the past -- they let you take photos of the paintings (although with "NO FLASH!" as the employees frequently call out to people). I guess it's understandable for famous things like Washington Crossing the Delaware or a Van Gogh self-portrait, both of which had crowds around them. But some people were taking picture of everything -- a 19th century cabinet, a broken Greek statue. Kind of defeats the purpose of going to a museum, I thought. Anyway, I took these of the exterior, an Egyptian Temple and a Jackson Pollock painting.

Obnoxious New York people I've encountered: A woman walked by me in the subway carrying a stack of those free daily Metro newspapers. She asked if I wanted one, and I said sure and took it. "Ahem, that's 50 cents," she said. Since it was supposed to be free, I tried to give it back and she shook her head angrily. Rolling my eyes, I gave her a dollar, which was all I had. "Actually, I having a tough time. Could you give me some more money?" she said. "I just gave you a dollar for a free paper," I told her. She stormed off in a huff.

Today is my last free day before classes start tomorrow. It's been rather disorienting having no official responsibilities, so I'm looking forward to it. They always make a point of saying how intense the work is going to be, but I'm up for it. Wish me luck!

I (Heart) New York

2006-08-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

The drama of moving now behind me, I'm really loving living in NYC. I've been to the city lots of times, but usually for some specific reason -- to visit someone, go to a museum or play, or most recently, to see like seven foreign movies in 48 hours. But I've never really had time to just poke around and explore the city until now, and it's way fun.
The weather (until today) has been gorgeous, perfect for walking around and playing tourist. I'm trying to do a lot of tourist stuff now, before school starts, because somehow going to the Statue of Liberty after living in NYC for a while just seems lame.
Given my limited financial means, I'm trying to do as much fun stuff for free as I can, and I think I've done a darn good job. Apart from food and subway fares, I've only paid cash money for the tour of the U.N. and the Statue. And yet I've done all of these things:
* Grant's Tomb -- Who's buried there? No one, as it turns out. U.S. Grant and his wife are in big stone caskets sitting on the marble floor, not underground. I never really knew what this place was before, I guess I expected a big headstone or something. But no, it's a *huge* marble dome, maybe 50 feet high, and looks like a cathedral inside. It's modeled on Napoleon's Tomb in Paris, which I've also visited. Very cool exhibit on Grant, who I didn't know much about, only that I didn't think he'd get such a royal treatment in death.
* Church-O-Rama -- Four churches so far. St. Patrick's I've been to before but is very pretty. St. John the Divine is right by Columbia, and is "the world's largest cathedral," according to the sign. Maybe it is, but it was hard to tell since it's under extensive renovation after a fire five years ago. The highlight of Trinity is the grave of Alexander Hamilton, where he ended up after that famous duel. St. Paul's is right next to Ground Zero, and is devoted to honoring the 9/11 relief workers. It's almost unbearably moving.
* Ground Zero -- I'd been here several times, but not since work began on the new tower. The site looks pretty much the same as it did six months ago, only with more construction noises.
* Brooklyn Bridge -- Here's something I've never been to before. It's worth the trip to walk across the raised middle part as cars whip by below. The walkway is wooden and feels like you're on a boardwalk, kinda precarious, but I guess it's okay if it's been there for 130 years.

I (Heart) New York II

2006-08-25T12:45:00.001-07:00

* The Flatiron Building -- Designed by Daniel Burnham, main character in "Devil in the White City.

* Wall Street -- After 9/11, you're not allowed in the Stock Exchange, so there's not much doing here really. Things I noticed: the street is really narrow, and the NYSE is right across the street from Federal Hall, the first U.S. Capitol. Seems more appropriate, or at least more honest, than what we have now.

* Central Park -- I live about six blocks away, so we wandered a lot of it waiting to get in the apartment on Saturday. Today I went back to go further down and sit and read for a while. It really is an amazing place. One part I walked through was so dense with trees, that all the city sounds and sights were gone. I could have been in Maine.
* Metropolitan Opera -- Walking around Central Park, I came across a mob of people the other night -- the Opera was about to start a free performance of Rigoletto, so I stuck around. It was amazing, or at least it sounded amazing, from where I was the people looked like ants. All I knew about Rigoletto was that it's about an insane clown, and I only know that because there's a Seinfeld where they go to see it while being stalked by an insane clown. I feel much more cultured having seen the whole thing.
* The United Nations -- One of the few things I've shelled out money for, but it was worth it. The tour was really informative, and we got to go inside all the rooms you hear about, the General Assembly, Security Council, etc. I always love to have a visual reference for places that crop up in the news, like the U.S. Capitol and Wall Street. Because I am a dork. (This is the security council.)

* Statue of Liberty / Ellis Island -- There aren't too many "big" NYC attractions that I've never been to before, but this was one of them. It was a fun time. You can't go into the statue after 9/11 (not sure why, given the security procedures that are more strict than the airport), but I enjoyed seeing her up close. Ellis Island was interesting, but I was kinda burnt out on the tourist scene by that point. I think I'll take it easy for a while now.

Incredibly close, yet so very far away

2006-08-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

So, how did your move to New York go? you might be wondering, since you're reading my blog about moving to New York. Simply put, not well.
Everything eventually worked out and I'm perfectly fine now, but the day of the move on Saturday was pretty much a disaster. I don't really want to dwell on it, but it is a good story, so here it is.
I had talked to my new roommate, Aubrey, earlier in the week to tell him that I'd be coming down on Saturday. He said he'd be working in the morning but would be home in the early afternoon. Fantastic, said I, see you then. My friend Laurel had very, very graciously offered, without my asking, to drive my belongings and I to the city, so the plans were squared with her.
Activity for the rest of the week continued apace -- the aforementioned selling of furniture and putting of various items in storage. I had been run ragged by Thursday morning but things were winding down, when Aubrey called. He had just found out he was going to be out of town all day on Saturday -- could I come some other time?
This, of course, was not possible. I'd already made arrangements a days before with another person who could only make it on Saturday, and why should I change my plans because he flaked? I rather insistently asked him to come up with an alternative. Could he leave the keys with someone else to let me in?
A few hours later, he called back, having arranged just that. His friend Devon would meet me in front of the building with keys Saturday morning.
We were back in business. Laurel and I completed the laborious project of getting everything I owned and had not stored into her van (even my bike!) on Friday night. We shipped out Saturday morning and made great time into the city, arriving at 11 a.m.
Devon arrived and handed off the keys, of which there were three, each with a different-colored rubber ring around it. The pink one unlocked the front door. After walking up five (ugh) flights of stairs, the orange one unlocked the door lock. I inserted the blue key, the third and final one, into the deadbolt and turned.
Nothing.
So began our day-long purgatory-like odyssey. Laurel tried the key, to no avail, as it only went one-quarter of the way around. I called Aubrey, who didn't answer his phone, soon to be a recurring theme. We went to lunch to wait for him to call back.
After lunch the time was 12:30. We tried the key again, unsuccessfully. I called Aubrey again, unsuccessfully. We went to sit in Morningside Park to wait for his call.
Two p.m. rolled around, still nothing. We went to try the key again, with predictable results. Aubrey's neighbor Carrie walked by and we pounced. Is there a trick to opening these doors? She tried, but nothing. Before she left, she gave me the name of the building manager.
I called, but got some kind of weird voice mail login code system that didn't get me anywhere. Laurel and I decided to walk around Central Park, five blocks away.
After traversing a good part of the park, from the bike trail to the tennis courts to the reservoir, we headed back, and called Aubrey again, no luck. By chance, we ran into Carrie in the hallway, who called the building manager herself. He said he'd be over in five minutes. Hope!
Forty-five minutes later, Laurel and I were still outside Aubrey's door waiting. Observing that this seemed like a Twilight Zone episode (what if Aubrey doesn't actually exist? or if we passed through a time portal to a point where no one lived in this apartment?) we amused ourselves by relating stories we remembered from the show.
I tried calling the manager again. I got him this time, but rather than explain why he was nearly an hour late, he told me there was nothing he could do -- he only had keys to the front door. Of course.
By this point, it was closing in on 5 p.m. and we had no idea if Aubrey was even coming home. I'd left five messages and heard nothing. Laurel and I began considering insane alternatives -- drive back to Easthampton? Camp out in the hallway for the night? Cold call one of the few people I know in the city and ask to stay with them? Nothing seemed right.
We headed back to the van to retrieve my laptop, which had numbers for New York people in it. Before we got there, the phone rang.
Aubrey was very apologetic -- oh, that's horrible, etc. He had been catering a huge birthday party for the five-year-old son of some business hotshot in Connecticut, but would be home "within the hour." We were saved!
An hour passed. Ninety minutes. It was getting dark and starting to rain, our nerves were frayed, whatever reserve of patience I had was nearly gone. After 7 p.m., more than eight hours after we parked in front of my building intending to move in, Aubrey arrived, having been stuck in traffic.
He let us in and agreed to help move my stuff up to the fifth floor (ahem, after all that, he didn't have a choice, as far as I was concerned). For a split second at the door, it looked like his key wasn't going to work either, and I nearly shrieked, but then it turned, and we were in. (I apparently had a bad key, one which he didn't bother to test out before leaving for me.)
I quickly realized that the apartment is a sauna, and we were all drenched with sweat by the time everything was inside. Then Laurel had to drive home to Easthampton, exhausted and frustrated. She ended up being caught in city traffic for hours, I learned later. I will never, ever be able to thank her enough.
So yeah, that's how my move went. Like I said, it's all been fine since then, but that was my "welcome to New York" experience.

Closing Time

2006-08-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

With apologies for my whining to anyone who's gone through it all before, moving is a total pain in the neck. I realized today that I've never "really" moved before, just from home to dorm room, and then to here, which is where I bought most of my stuff. I wish I didn't have to move again for a long time, but given the nature of my living arrangement in NYC (one room in someone's apartment while in grad school), it's inevitable.

I learned today that getting rid of used furniture is an almost Sisyphean enterprise. I had a perfectly fine La-Z-Boy recliner that I'd love to keep but just don't have room for. I put it on Craigslist, and got a few responses from people interested in it. I told them to call and set up a time to get it, but they never did. So then I tried to give it away to a friend, but she found she didn't have room for it.

So today I attempted to sell it back to the Amherst Trading Post, the pretty much literal hole in the wall where I got it. They said on the phone they'd it, so I drove all the way out there only to have the woman look at it and say "Oh, sorry, I'd only take it if it was in better condition." Never mind that it's in the same condition it was in when I bought it from them two years ago, their standards have apparently gone up since then.

She suggested I bring it to the Salvation Army, which I did, only to get surly attitude from the people who work there before they finally took it. All told, it took over two and half hours, just today, to give away a chair I'd have kept if at all possible. Don't get me started on disposing of old computers...

I've taken the last three weeks off from work, which seemed decadent before I did it, but I've just been working morning to night on stuff like this the whole time. Well, in between two Red Sox games (one Big Papi walkoff homer), Six Flags, two going-away gatherings, and my brother's band in concert in Boston. Okay, so it was a little decadent.

Anyway, enough of my moaning. Soon (Saturday afternoon) I'll be in New York, with no responsibilities until Aug. 31 except unpacking and exploring the Big Apple. Should be fun. Before long, I'll be able to concentrate on stressing out about readings and my thesis, while thinking about this Onion article.

Fun with digiphotos

2006-08-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

I bought a digital camera in part with my accumulated "Gazettebucks" (two and a half years later, thanks Kristi!) so I thought I'd test it out. For anyone who never made it out here to visit, this is where I live in Easthampton:

And this is downtown Northampton. It's about as charming as you'd expect from a place that calls itself "The Paradise of America" with a straight face.

Entering the blogosphere

2006-08-15T19:40:00.001-07:00

The Gazette's rival paper, The Springfield Republican, hosts a bunch of community blogs on its Web site. Most of the blogs are totally pointless, but the Republican runs an ad in the physical paper every week with excerpts from them. One week, the ad had quotes in it like these:

"Remember when you were a kid and you'd get new sneakers and suddenly it felt like anything was possible? You felt like you were running faster than ever before and no jump was too far. I've been reliving that feeling this week. I replaced the tires on my mountain bike."

"Today I saw a robin outside my house on Prospect Street. Spring is almost here!"

Someone at the Gazette cut out the ad and put it on the bulletin board with a note reading: "Why blogs will never replace newspapers."

That story somehow seemed appropriate for my first blog post. Since this is just a post about someone else's post about seeing a robin, it's doubly useless. And there's more where that came from.