Human Like A House

Lately, it feels like New York can’t decide if it wants to step into spring or not – one day it’s fine with 50 degrees, the next it’s snowing sideways. Not that this affects my outing habits, as I’ve never been one for hibernating. So last weekend was another thwarted, wayward trip out to Studio B, in the depths of Greenpoint, before heading back to Manhattan for the Pull-Out Method party at Club Midway, swooning for one last Locksley song. There was also a night spent at a Bulgarian bar, where we danced to Bulgarian techno underneath a grand chandelier and hanging underwear. And there was an afternoon at the Pulse Art Fair, where everything seemed to be pixelated (see: Girl With a Pearl Earring hanging upside down in spools of thread), and even the photography, protruding from the walls on slabs of wood, was anything but normal.

To Hell with Good Intentions

Well I must say that was the most boring Oscars ceremony I have ever seen. Where was Adrian Brody accosting Halle Berry, or Billy Crystal editing himself into the Best Picture nominees? Most upsetting to me, however, was watching the acceptance of Little Miss Sunshine for best Original Screenplay.

Aside from the fact that I did not actually see the film (I like to avoid total schlock vehicles), it’s the screenwriter dude’s speech that really got to me. Here, he said something like this:


"When I was growing up, my family took a cross country trip in a VW bus and it was the funnest time of my life."

What? What! Funnest. What kind of writer accepts an award, on national television, standing in front of Peter O’Toole, by slaughtering the English language?


On a brighter note, I think Cate Blanchett is the most beautiful person alive at the moment and any casting director who saw her at the podium, alongside Clive Owen, would be a fool not to pair the two of them in an onscreen romance.

Get it together, Hollywood, get it together.

Honey or Tar

chop chop chop chop chop chop


photo

Future Days

It was decided last weekend that Bushwick during the winter time, with its graffiti and leftover mounds of snow, feels like East Berlin (see: Lives of Others). And so one night was spent hanging out with goofy friends in another country, of sorts, and the rest of the weekend was filled with all kinds of New York commodities, like Indian and Vietnamese cuisine, Children of Men (best film of 2006), and subway hassle. Because, seriously, I haven't quite reached the point in my life where I can really take off to Berlin for a weekend.

Kids Will Be Skeletons

On the second and third Saturday of each month, Moby Dick: The Sermon is performed in the chapel of Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery. The cemetery itself is well worth checking out, if only for the undeveloped park-like backdrop and Gothic-inspired architecture. To that end, it seems only fitting to visit the cemetery at the peak of winter, when the degrees are barely reaching into the teens. This provides a literal bone-chilling effect, coordinating perfectly with a presumably haunted outing.

As for the performance itself, I am convinced that anybody born in the past four decades did not actually finish Moby Dick. Let’s be honest here: the book is not a fun read, not in the 11th grade, and not in adulthood. So what better way to experience an excerpt from this "masterpiece" than to see a live CliffsNotes version in a graveyard?

Father Mapple is played by Richard Kirkwood, in an exceptionally theatrical re-creation of the scene from the novel in which a grim preacher shares the deep-seated tale of Jonah and the great mammal that consumed him. As part of the audience, you are expected to stand in as the assembly of whalers, but Kirkwood commands the bulk of the performance.

Sure, it seems a bit odd to spend the first half of your Saturday night listening to a sermon, in a cemetery no less. But if you experience it as a piece of entertainment rather than a homily, it works. At $20 a ticket, it is indeed a costly event. Yet if you tell them you’re a student, you get in for $10. Oh, and if they ask for your Student ID, just tell them you left it back at the dorm.

Cry Me A River

Sleeping Lessons

King of Carrot Flowers

Last weekend was one of those perfect New York weekends, if ya know what I mean.

Heartattack and Vine

"One can become a celebrity with scarcely any pretences to talent or achievement whatsoever. Much modern celebrity seems the result of careful promotion or great good luck or something besides talent and achievement: Mr. Donald Trump, Ms. Paris Hilton, Mr. Regis Philbin, take a bow.

...Fame, then, at least as I prefer to think of it, is based on true achievement; celebrity on the broadcasting of that achievement, or the inventing of something that, if not scrutinized too closely, might pass for achievement. Celebrity suggests ephemerality, while fame has a chance of lasting, a shot at reaching the happy shores of posterity."

--Joseph Epstein, The Culture of Celebrity

Sorry for Laughing

Last weekend was a dinner/dance party in Bushwick, the hilarious Gutenberg! The Musical, half an hour (all you can stand) at Circa Tabac, and a Sunday evening trip out to Prospect Heights to eat pigs-in-a-blanket and watch some puddles in high definition.