cityblog

My latest at Relevant is up.

And wow, Bible.com picked up two of my Relevant articles: here and here.

Filed at 2:53 pm under Writing
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As you can see from the “In Short” box at the right, I’ve decided to essentially throw caution to the wind and categorize myself as “reformed”. It’s a short fall (if you can call it that), as the more I read of reformed theology the more I realize that it’s what I’ve sort of believed all along, and the extra more distinctive bits are easy to swallow with the good, well-thought-out Biblical justification.

So there you have it. I guess I’m reformed.

(And for where I’m kind of leaning on liturgy these days, check this post, containing C.S. Lewis’ feelings on the subject..)

Filed at 11:04 am under Life
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Life is crazy; I second-guess myself, I spend time wondering if I will ever be good enough, if I’m not just good at pretending to be good, what my life would be like had I made different choices at the ripe old age of 10, and where I am headed. My head swirls at times with all I should do, relationships that need maintenance, hurts and wants and loves, and some strange urgency to make every moment count.

Then I come home through the rain, and make my lunch for tomorrow, and eat good bread and salad and cheese. I wander uptown six blocks and have tea with Apryl in her lovely inspiring apartment, and discuss life and love and other mysteries. I come back home through the rain with my umbrella and soft furry boots. I play with French while I listen to Over the Rhine, and I read a bit of John Piper, and I realize . . . this is where I belong.

This is so right.

Filed at 12:15 am under Daily Goings-On
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This article from the New York Times caught my attention this morning, especially after discussing socialism/communism (i.e., how it is a nice idea and would work great if people weren’t naturally selfish) with Tom last night over dinner. Small lightbulbs in my head are starting to glow a little brighter after reading the article.

The 21st-Century Garret
By DAVID McANINCH
Published: November 27, 2005

SOMEWHERE beyond the last hip outpost of Far East Williamsburg, the shag haircuts and vintage sunglasses finally disappear. There, on the gritty interstices of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, in the shadow of the J/M/Z elevated line, lifestyle is replaced by just life: 99-cent stores, live poultry markets, accident lawyers (1-888-I-CAN-SUE), shabby bodegas and people engaged in the sometimes brutish business of simply getting by in a city where everyone else seems to be making it.

But a few yards from this ordinary midway, in an old brick schoolhouse on a weedy side street near Broadway, a handful of young New Yorkers have claimed a small piece of middle ground. They’re not hard to spot; they are artists, musicians, writers and performers, and occasionally one will emerge through a featureless steel door: a lanky guy lugging an amp and an old Victrola, maybe, or a long-boned blonde wearing a torn T-shirt and beat-up sneakers.

You could call their house an artists’ collective or a commune, except that its residents work independently and, aside from sharing groceries and some common space, earn their keep. They’re not squatters - everyone pays rent and utilities - and they’re decidedly not slackers: many them put in hours that would shame a first-year law associate. Although they are taking part in an age-old urban ritual, the exodus of young people from traditional bohemian strongholds to terra incognita, they don’t think of themselves as homesteaders.

Knit together more by friendship and mutual emotional support than by circumstance, these city dwellers are an ad hoc family. Like so many New Yorkers, they have woven new skeins of kinship in a place where blood relations are often far away - an absence most keenly felt during the feast-filled weeks of the holiday season.

They also have found a solution to at least one of New York’s seemingly unsolvable real estate puzzles. That is, how can struggling, if not penniless, artists thrive in a city where the average Manhattan studio apartment rents for $2,000 a month and has barely enough room for an easel, much less for practicing pliés or the cello?

Whether they’re artists’ “combines” or informal arrangements among friends, similar examples of organic group living can be found elsewhere in New York, especially outside Manhattan, and have long been a fixture of other American cities. Like many of the people living in these places, the inhabitants of this old schoolhouse seem uninterested in the traditional boundaries of apartment living. Yet they are not disaffected hippies or strident radicals, nor are they alien to ambition and achievement, two touchstones of New York life.

Amazing Space

It doesn’t sound pretty if you do the math. Ten overcommitted creative types in their mid-20’s to mid-30’s divided by two kitchens and two bathrooms, minus chore wheels and duty rosters, should equal clogged plumbing and frequent skirmishing. And indeed, luxury isn’t the order of the day at the house. The décor consists of exposed pipes, homemade furniture and found art. The downstairs bedrooms are windowless crypts with concrete-block walls. The kitchens are grungy. But no one seems to complain, perhaps because the payoff for these privations is space, lots of it: a wood-floor dance studio, a sprawling multipurpose work area, a light-filled living room on the second floor, and a cluttered tarpaper-roof garden - all for about $800 per person.

The group house was born, so to speak, in 1996 when Erin McGonigle, an artist then in her mid-20’s, answered a “House for Rent” ad in The Village Voice. When she went to see the space, debris filled every square inch of the ground floor, and an open fire burned beneath the exhaust chute where a boiler used to be. After she and a friend spent five months unbuilding and rebuilding the ground floor, they invited a few more artist friends to move in. They called the house ORT - the German word for site or place and also, they decided, an acronym for “organizing resources together.” The second floor opened in 2002, and the community soon doubled to 10.

When rooms occasionally became available, house members preferred to attract prospective residents by word of mouth, a principal reason they did not want the house’s exact location disclosed. Gaining residency generally required taking part in a sort of counterculture version of a co-op board interview, often with tea and chocolate and even the occasional recitation of poetry.

Ms. McGonigle, a wiry redhead who comes across as more Berkeley than Brooklyn, envisioned ORT as a shared art studio and, perhaps more important, a collective social experiment. “We put our time and effort into such an enormous and daunting project,” she said, “not simply because we needed a lot of space to work, but because we were very interested in what could be gained, not lost, from living with people.” She found housemates who shared her belief that urban group living can be more than mere economic necessity.

That communal spirit was apparent one sweltering Sunday morning in August when two of those housemates, Erika Yorio and her friend Lindsay Campbell, who had recently moved out but was subletting her old room for a few months, were preparing brunch in the second-floor kitchen for a dozen friends. The two made an odd pair. Ms. Campbell is a 28-year-old actress with soft eyes and creamy skin who has the studied grace of, well, an actress. Ms. Yorio, a 26-year-old poet, is a straight-talking Westchester girl who wears an old baseball cap around the house and isn’t ashamed to bring McDonald’s home for dinner occasionally. The two flitted back and forth in the kitchen as their friends streamed through the front door.

As the house filled up, they carried dishes of food to a giant makeshift table made of three wood beams bolted together and perched on plates of scrap metal. The whole assemblage swayed ominously as people took their seats. Ms. Yorio set down a bowl containing what looked like scrambled eggs. “Uh, this was going to be a frittata,” she announced. “But now it’s not.”

Later, near the window leading to the roof garden, a few guests drank sangria and smoked cigarettes while Aaron Nauta, Ms. Campbell’s boyfriend, held court. “This kid put a box cutter to my throat right on the corner out here,” he said. “I gave him $9 and my credit card. I tried to tell him that he doesn’t have to do what he’s doing, and the kid actually apologized as he was walking away with my money.”

The scent of hand-rolled tobacco and cheap wine mingled with the diesel fumes drifting in from the sun-blasted street outside. It was the East Village circa 1985, minus the dope and fatalism.

Life on a Frontier

If the minor annoyances of group living don’t seem to bother the housemates, some of the stickier facts of street life on the edge of Bushwick do. While overall crime in the police precinct that includes the house has dropped by more than 63 percent since 1993, assaults and robberies persist along the blocks surrounding their building. Another ORT resident, a dancer and choreographer named Samir Bitar, said that the dry cleaner he patronizes was robbed recently and that in addition to Mr. Nauta, one ORT housemate had been mugged in the neighborhood.

“A friend told me that real estate agents in the city have a term for us: risk-oblivious youth,” Mr. Bitar said. “They say we’re the precursors to the gentrifiers, and that makes us all ill at ease. But it’s true that we’re mostly white, and we’re all college-educated. We all have some level of luxury.”

On this weekday afternoon, the first floor was empty save for Mr. Bitar. Well-toned and dressed in sweats and a sleeveless T-shirt, he exuded a rakish 80’s vibe. After brewing a cup of tea in the kitchen, he took a seat by the window. The smell of dead fish from the cargo bay of a nearby food distributor wafted into the house.

When he moved to New York a couple of years ago, Mr. Bitar said, he felt tested by the city and by the neighborhood. But he believed that the benefits of communal living outweighed the depredations of city life; in his mind, New York’s harshness served only to enhance a sense of sanctuary in the house, and of shared purpose among its residents.

“We’re an amazingly functioning, hard-working group of people,” he said, “and we all have this idea - it sounds cheesy, but I’m going to say it - of working toward a better world, of making sacrifices. This isn’t always the safest neighborhood, and it’s hot in here in the summer and freezing cold in the wintertime, but it’s so beyond that for us.” He stared at the floor, searching for the right words. “We are a group of people who are quite consciously choosing to walk away from - well, to not live the normal American way.”

The American way, of course, has a tendency to catch up with people whether or not they want it to, but for now Mr. Bitar and his housemates are just trying to come to terms with living in a neighborhood where they often feel out of place and sometimes even preyed upon. This is not to say that a siege mentality prevails at ORT. There is a desire among the housemates to reach out to their community, though no one is quite sure how to do that. For the time being, reaching out means getting on friendly terms with the neighbors, or with the guys at the 24-hour deli, or the women at the laundry.

A few neighbors have reached back. Hugo Sanchez, a 54-year-old electrician who has lived across the street from the schoolhouse for 38 years, acted as an ambassador to the block for Ms. McGonigle when she and her friends first moved in, and he still lends a hand from time to time. “It’s really dark in the area by their front door,” he said, “so I helped them install a strong light with a sensor.”

Degrees of acceptance by ORT’s neighbors vary. Sibu Chakrabarti, who came to the United States from India 25 years ago and owns a pharmacy up the street, was familiar with the young people living in the old schoolhouse, but he wasn’t sure exactly what their arrival meant for the area. “I see more and more Caucasian young people like them in the neighborhood,” he said. “They’re definitely changing the demographic. Whether it’s an improvement, I’m not sure.”

He figured that any rise in the neighborhood’s quality of life owed more to the forces of macroeconomics than to the racial makeup of newcomers. “Attitudes have changed,” he said. “People don’t talk about race-related issues anymore. When the economy goes better, everything goes better.”

Perhaps, but whether race matters to local residents, the subject can be hard to ignore. Ms. Yorio cheerfully described a scene that she chalked up to the sheer novelty of being white in a predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhood. “When I came to interview at the house,” she recalled, “I was walking down the street, and I heard some guy yell out: ‘Hey, girl, you’re not black! You’re white!’ ”

Something Like Home

If life on the streets outside the house is sometimes rough-edged and chaotic, the day-to-day goings-on inside are surprisingly mellow. It’s true that residents enjoy a built-in social life of group meals and parties - this year, for example, Mr. Bitar held his third annual “Orphans’ Thanksgiving,” a multicultural food fest (entrees have included udon noodles, crepes and roast duck) that involves more than a dozen housemates and friends who, for disparate reasons, have chosen not to spend the holiday with their kin. For the most part, however, there is a strong inducement to devote free time to composing or rehearsing or writing. In this regard, the older housemates seem to serve, consciously or not, as role models.

“This isn’t really a hanging-out place for me,” Keiko Uenishi, a three-year resident, said over coffee one morning. “But this place is so interesting, and it helps me focus.” Ms. Uenishi, who has lived in the city for 16 years, describes herself as an interpretive musician. She was perched on an old wooden chair, her knees pulled tight against her chest, cradling her cup of coffee as if it were a talisman.

At one point, with a face still puffy from sleep, Ms. Yorio emerged from the back of the house, peered into the recesses of the refrigerator, and shouted, “Keiko, you want to share the rest of this fruit salad?”

“Yeah, O.K.,” Ms. Uenishi replied. Then, brushing a strand of purple hair from her face, she resumed her thought: “The lack of privacy was hard at first, but I have a more secure feeling here. This was the first place in New York where I felt at home.” Still, the bulk of her time is spent in her 12-by-18-foot bedroom, which is windowless and cavelike, illuminated mostly by the screen of her laptop, on which she composes.

Ariana Reines, a 25-year-old writer and a doctoral student in French and comparative literature at Columbia who has lived at the house for more than a year, said she found it a boon to have housemates who could share the benefits of age and experience. “It was very important for me to find a house like this,” she said, “partly because I’m able to talk to people who are really committed and rigorous with their work and who have been doing it for much longer.”

It was a Tuesday night, and Ms. Reines was sitting at the swaying second-floor dining table beneath a strange, sculptural tangle of cheap holiday lights. “I get a great deal of momentum and energy from being here,” she said in an urgent, almost breathless tone, “and am able to be a little bit more impervious when things get desperate and crazy.” Those two words - desperate and crazy - come up frequently in her conversation.

As Ms. Reines spoke, Amy Hirschbach, a 21-year-old college student who was subletting the room of a house member who was away for the summer, drifted into the kitchen wearing a tank top and boxer shorts and started cooking her dinner on the stove, flooding the second floor with the smell of garlic and onions.

“I’ve lived in all kinds of crazy roommate situations,” Ms. Reines continued. “I was living in a beautiful loft with a friend who tried to kill herself the same night I broke up with my boyfriend. And I’ve lived in a lot of cheap sublets, so I feel good coming home to this solid brick building.”

As she was speaking, a tall, skinny man with long hair zipped back and forth from the rear of the house, depositing pieces of odd-looking electronic equipment in a neat pile on the living-room floor. He introduced himself as Toshio Kajiwara and announced that he was headed to another part of Brooklyn, where he and two friends had a gig performing something he called manipulated music. Leaving behind a flier with an address on it, he hoisted his gear and rushed out the door.

At the performance space that evening - the place turned out to be a repurposed concrete storage silo on the banks of the Gowanus - Mr. Kajiwara stood half-obscured behind a formidable assemblage of electronic equipment, waiting for the audience to trickle in. Like Ms. Uenishi, he is an experimental musician. He has lived in the schoolhouse for three years and is 35, making him another de facto house elder, though it seems unlikely he would characterize himself as such, in part because he speaks quietly and eschews lengthy or dramatic self-revelation.

“I moved to New York 15 years ago,” he said. “I write for music magazines and sell rare records to make money.”

When the subject of trying to make it as an artist in New York came up, he stared into the middle distance, as if savoring an old memory. Then, with the slightest laugh and shake of the head, he offered a single, unassailable truth. “New York,” he said, “is a constant struggle.”

Filed at 11:18 am under New York City
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If things start looking funky and unusual and out-of-place around here, stay tuned, and fear not. You’re still on my blog. I’m just a compulsive designer and need to change the design every so often.

Filed at 4:00 pm under Daily Goings-On
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Ahh, Pablo Neruda.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Filed at 12:51 pm under Poetry
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Four-and-a-half-day weekends are bad for the motivation to actually go to work on Monday. Bugger.

Filed at 8:55 am under Life, Facepalm
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Wired magazine’s Ultimate Geek Gift Guide.

Filed at 11:58 am under Geekitude
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Heading northward after I leave work at noon (as per my boss’ instructions), to the land which my mother said is a “winter wonderland” right now. Hurrah! I need snow boots desperately though. Or maybe I’ll just stay inside curled up around the fire with a book and some good coffee.

I love Thanksgiving. It is by far my favorite holiday. Besides all the food and trimmings and family and relaxing time . . . it’s fun to just sit around and be thankful for everything. I have so unbelievably much to be thankful for.

My dad’s mom isn’t coming for Thanksgiving after all, so we are spending the day with my family, my aunt and uncle and their three kids, and my mom’s parents. That will be a new experience and rather fun. I haven’t seen my little cousins (or my big cousin for that matter) in a long time.

I’m planning on finishing Blue Like Jazz on the trip up today, and then starting Desiring God and Writing Down the Bones. Hurrah for time to read.

Last night Tom and I had dinner with Catherine’s delightful family at the Clinton Street Baking Company, which has the best blueberry pancakes I have ever had in my entire life.

Friday is my five-month “anniversary” of moving to New York. Wow.

Filed at 11:16 am under Life, Daily Goings-On, Travel, Books
3 Comments

I’ve been rather introspective on the blog of late, so here’s something to cheer you up, courtesy of Dave Barry (of the Miami Herald), who made my college newspaper-reading experience so much more enjoyable.

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.

And . . .

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.

Adieu, till inspiration strikes (and I suspect that will be in the near future).

Filed at 11:43 am under Funnies
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From Angela’s blog today - and too good not to snag and post.

“The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome… religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.”

Tim Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church (TVC’s mother church)

Filed at 5:27 pm under Life
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If you check out my sidebar, you’ll note that I’ve been reading Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, by Donald Miller. I realize it’s a bit trendy to be reading this book now, but I was curious about the fuss.

Well, I’m enjoying it. Miller has an unusual conversational writing style (something I am rather prone to) and his insights are very simple, but rarely said. Many of his stories are connected with spending time on a college campus (the name escapes me at the moment) in the northwest, and having people look at him like he had two heads and wonder why, as a Christian, you would ever put yourself in such a “heathen” place. And then He tells what God did there. I have gotten the same reaction about being in New York (this is the devil’s playground, right? ha!) and I’m glad there are people out there telling the truth.

Here are the two quotes I stopped, chuckled about, and wrote into my notebook:

“I was a fundamentalist Christian once. It lasted a summer. I was in that same phase of trying to discipline myself to ‘behave’ as if I loved light and not ‘behave’ as if I loved darkness. I used to get really ticked about preachers who talked too much about grace, because they tempted me to not be disciplined. I figured what people needed was a kick in the butt, and if I failed at godliness it was because those around me weren’t trying hard enough. I believed if word got out about grace, the whole church was going to turn into a brothel. I was a real jerk, I think.”
pg 79

“There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.)”
pg 100

And this gem I will throw in for free because it is funny, and it is from last night.
Tom, with cell phone pressed to ear, and without explanation: Tony, where is your bed?
Tony, with a rather befuddled expression: My bed? Uh? It’s . . . in the bedroom.
Catherine and Alissa, on the couch: <collapse in giggles>

Filed at 4:13 pm under Life, Friends, Writing, Funnies, Books
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I’ve been carting around little black notebooks for about a week and a half now, in trying to further myself as a writer and keep notes on everything I see around me. It’s starting to work.

Anyhow, sometimes I sit with a coffee and watch the city go by, and I’m overcome. So I wrote a few bits in the notebooks, and I want to put them here so that I have them for later. Read them or not, it doesn’t matter. :)

11.17.05 - (Sitting on a bench in Trump Tower on 5th Ave with a mocha)
New York in winter operates on a backwards schedule. The sun rises and the streets are filled with somber people in somber garb of pinstriped blue and black. That is why tourists stand out so much in the daytime - they always look like they are from another world in their normal clothing.

But at night! Oh, the nights here are grand. As the sun sets you can feel the city come slowly to life. You can almost hear the whirring of the gears.

New York at night is magical, like a continual display of Christmas lights. Windows are strands of brilliant white, and behind them the landmarks in color - the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Tower, and buildings I don’t know quite yet.

It is sheer bliss to wander from the village to the Hudson and sit contemplating the glorious light in reflection of lights in Jersey City. The waves ripple and sparkle and are still - you can see the Lady with her torch - and boats crawl by. And in the sky, the true starlight in tiny scattered pinpoints only heightens the feeling of being at the very center of the galaxy.

I dare anyone to wander there on a clear night and not fall in love.

It is right, and good.

—

11.9.05 - (In the window of Starbucks on Astor Place, with a latte)

Truly, how can you wake up in a place like this every morning and not think you’re just still dreaming?

You can sit in a window of a Starbucks with a $5 coffee and just watch the world go by. Those who say New York is unnatural, that this isn’t how people were meant to live, are simply out of their heads. Every minute you rub shoulders with a dozen humans beloved of God, handcrafted by him. Life here revolves around meeting with other people, around building a community for support and love, an urban family. Every day you’re brought face-to-face with the diversities of humanity.

I can’t help but feel, as I sit and watch the throng wander by, how much God must love this place. So many of His beloved are here.

Filed at 3:38 pm under New York City, Writing
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Is there such a thing as manic-bloggerness? I swing madly from uberbloggy to silent without reason.

The week has dragged. Since Tuesday, I guess, since I wasn’t even here Monday. So really I’ve only had two and a half days worth of week, but Friday night can’t come fast enough . . . although tonight should be good. Thursdays are wonderful.

My deadline at Relevant switched to Fridays, and suddenly I’m scrambling. Blast. I need to get people to start sending me things. ::knocks on monitor:: Hello, anyone out there? Send me articles!

Tom’s given me permission (and even blessing) to kiss my novel goodbye, for a while, and since it was his doings in the first place, I feel alright about putting it in the stack of half-finished writing for a later date. I need to find a plot I adore before I plunge into it. I just don’t have a lot of creativity lately - life has been so absurd and wonderful and bizarre, and if I wrote it into a book everyone would say it was contrived and unrealistic. G’bye, NaNoWriMo, I’ll do it next year.

One of my co-workers got a set of Bose headphones yesterday, and we’ve all been playing with them. They are tres awesome. They really feely like they suck all the outside sound away. (Now I’m peripherally seeing the guy two seats down from me dancing in his seat with the headphones on. We BofA people are cool, yo.)

Filed at 3:37 pm under Life, Daily Goings-On, Geekitude
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. . . Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s . . .

Filed at 3:47 pm under Life
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<hockey geek>
Wow, RPI! Someone must have lit a fire under the team this year. They won both games this weekend - including against 20th-ranked Quinnipiac - and now have a 2-1-1 record in the ECAC and 6-4-1 overall. Not a stellar record, but for RPI it’s stellar.

And, this week, three of the four ECAC hockey honorees are from RPI: Jonathan Ornelas for Player of the Week, Mathias Lange for Rookie of the Week, and Oren Eizenmann to the honor roll.

AND, they’re now rated 22nd in the nation in the USCHO.com polls this week. Whoa, dude.

I’m all full of Puckman pride. :D
</hockey geek>

Filed at 12:37 pm under Geekitude, Hockey
2 Comments

A great weekend. To be honest, I didn’t do too much during it, but it was grand.

Friday was the most completely lazy day I’ve had in recent memory, and it was fantastic. And that night Catherine, Tom, Angela, Angela’s friend Steve, and I gathered to watch Apres Vous and to eat pizza and risotto. Saturday I got up late, had brunch with Katie and Angela, and went shopping in Soho. I bought much . . . finally made the switch to J’Adore (and have already garnered a compliment, ha!), and some great shirts and jeans at Anthropologie, which has a huge sale section! Hurrah! My parents visited on Sunday and went to lunch with Catherine, Angela, Tom & me after church. I love my parents. I love my friends. I am blessed.

Yesterday I cleaned and shopped. I went back to Soho for a couple of things (and a smashingly awesome pair of work pants at Anthropologie - pinkish tweed - they are marvelous!). Tom introduced me to Whole Foods (one should always bring a boy shopping, because they can Carry Things). I have food in the house again. I even brought my lunch today. We bought buttermilk fried chicken and candied sweet potatoes and ate on the floor in the living room, watching The Hours. Nicole Kidman is brilliant.

Busy week. Life is good.

Filed at 11:50 am under Life, Daily Goings-On, Film
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My article for this week on Relevant: Ten Clothing Budget Tips.

Filed at 12:34 pm under Writing
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I’ve mentioned it a thousand times before, but the most stunningly beautiful piece of music ever created is the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th. It’s on the soundtrack for Mr. Holland’s Opus (which I now realize I simply must purchase).

Anyhow, from the very first time I heard it, it made me want to cry. And it has the same effect every time I hear it.

Ludwig von Beethoven - you knew how to weave melodies that would make the angels weep.

Filed at 3:52 pm under Music
1 Comment

I’m sure my loyal readership is just dying to know what I’ve been up to. But alas, you’ll only get bits and pieces thrown to you.

</tongue-in-cheek>

I have a lovely four-day weekend stretching in front of me, due to a holiday and a day off. What shall be done during it? Firstly, sleep, a commodity that has been scarce of late. Also some grocery and clothing shopping. Music, dancing, museums, fellowship, food . . . just a glowingly beautiful weekend of rest and relaxation.

Backing up . . . Katie’s friend Matthew from London has been in town for the week, sleeping on our futon. He has been the cleanest and neatest of house guests, and the apartment has smelled of lovely men’s cologne & aftershave to boot.

Interruption: I find myself using &’s an awful lot lately.

Last night Matthew, Tom, Katie, and I had dinner at August, a restaurant on Bleecker. We were able to sit in the “garden” - covered over with a glass roof through which you could see fallen leaves, and would have seen the stars had it not been so cloudy. I had intriguing things like quail and braised Concord grapes. It was beautiful.

I’ve stumbled through three or four movie sets in Soho and the Village this week. Last night we walked through a movie filming right on my street. Amazing! Living here seems more and more unreal every day.

I have a stack of books on my desk crying out for me to read them. Right now (because I can never read one book at once) I am working through Life As a Vapor (John Piper), The Writing Life (Annie Dillard), Writing Down the Bones (Natalie Goldberg), and Blue Like Jazz (Donald Miller). Other books waiting for me to read them:
• Desiring God - Piper
• Don’t Waste Your Life - Piper (sense a theme here?)
• What Is Reformed Theology? - R.C. Sproul
• Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
. . . and the most recent issue of the New Yorker. Just a little light reading.

Christmas is coming. Everything seems to be spilling over with light.

Filed at 12:15 pm under Life, Daily Goings-On, Books
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I might have a plot. This is turning into a chick-lit book. On the other hand, I am a chick, and I’m writing lit . . . so . . . what can you expect? It doesn’t require major mental facilities.

Filed at 12:04 pm under Writing
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Behold, le cut hairs. Bumble & Bumble is worth every penny (and there’s a whole lot of them). The hair was unbelievably ratty and yicky and needed it dreadfully.

And my editorial post is up at Relevant.

Filed at 9:24 pm under Daily Goings-On
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God is very, very good to me. Very good.

Relevant has an RSS feed now.

I’ve decided on classes for next semester (at least tentatively). While French is actually going splendidly and I’m learning a lot, I don’t think it’s as practical as writing & journalism classes. So, I’m going to take these two courses, both of which are shorter than a full semester.

The first is Freelancing for the Novice Writer. This is the course description:

Do you have a secret desire to see your name in print? Novices, take steps to getting the byline you’ve always wanted in this crash course that maps the way. Discover how to translate professional and personal interests into publishable concepts and ideas. Identify appropriate markets, and formulate effective pitches. Learn to recognize industry terms and pitfalls that often fluster first-timers. Explore the gamut of writing genres, from music review to personal essay to parody. Complete the course with at least one polished piece and a step-by-step plan to get it into print. Please bring any drafts, ideas, or pipe dreams to the first class.

The bolded section is what sounds most useful and appealing to me. This is a six-week course in February and March on Wednesday nights. The professor used to work for Rolling Stone and Talk Magazine.

The second course is Film & Media Journalism. I’ve never done any film or media criticism or journalism, but I have a hunch that I might have a knack for it if I try. Behold, the course description:

Want to get the real behind-the-scenes story? Forget celebrity puff pieces and studio press junkets, this course gives you the tools to go after the stories that matter, from investigative exposés to trend pieces that shed light on the culture at large. Learn the ins and outs of the arts and entertainment industry (from movies to new media) and find out how to pitch, research, and write engaging, in-depth stories for major newspapers, glossy magazines, trades, and websites. Taught by an experienced editor and writer, this course features guest speakers and industry insiders from studio reps to feature editors and veteran freelance journalists.

It’s a five-week course in April and May on Tuesday nights. According to his bio, the professor has written for TimeOut and Indie Magazine, among others, now edits IndieWire, and is a filmmaker.

At any rate, I am excited!

Filed at 11:40 am under Life, Daily Goings-On, Writing
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I should love to write a nice lovely long entry today, but as Tom has said a lot lately, “Blogging is writer’s crack” . . . and I have three major writing things to turn out before I leave today.

So I will not write any more, but I’ll leave you with this little gem because I am in an impish mood.

Further Reflections on Parsley
By Ogden Nash
Parsley
Is gharsley.

Adieu.

Filed at 12:01 pm under Daily Goings-On
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I’m going to have to bring my laptop on the train tomorrow. I have to turn out a few things for my first real Monday at Relevant, and to keep Tom happy I have to write more than the 2300 words I have for my novel.

And, I’ve been looking at classes at NYU for next spring. A couple of them really caught my eye: Freelancing for the Novice Writer and Film & Media Journalism. They are short sessions and don’t run simultaneously, so I could conceivably take both. I just may.

This is so exciting.

Filed at 4:57 pm under Writing
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