I thought now would be as good a time as any to explain the header at the top of this site (as of July 25, 2008).

My freshman year of film school involved a course in still photography that was a prerequisite for classes involving motion picture. Now, ironically enough, I entered film school without ever having touched a camera that didn’t get handed into the photolab and disposed of after processing. I got together some bucks from my summer job taking inventory in the back rooms of a local Filene’s and bought myself a fully-manual 35m SLR  camera. You know, the ones with the big flashes and intimidatingly long lenses.

Anyway, our final assignment was to take photographs as if they were shots in a film and animate a story on the editing platform of the moment.  I decided to do an updated version of the fairytale “Bluebeard”, making it into what I thought at the time was a Hitchcockian thriller. For those not in the know, the tale centers around a young woman who is married to a wealthy man. He tells her she can’t go in a certain room but that the rest of his mansion is hers to explore. Of course, the chick goes in the room and finds the seven dead bodies of his seven first brides. Needless to say, my project was more Romero than Hitchcock.

Anyway, I decided that I needed a soft, reassuring place that could be an oasis of love in the middle of my noir-esque lighting scheme and corn-syrup fake blood. Something to contrast the antagonist’s chilling homicidal tendencies with the protagonist’s sweetness, because “contrast” was a word that would make it arty. Somehow, I decided the perfect place for a murder-centered thriller’s would be a cozy cafe.

Thus was born the photo in question. I propped myself in front of the “Tea Spot,” an adorable place to have high tea, write a paper, or admire tea cozies. The shop is on a section of Macdougal that’s an odd mix of urban redbrick apartments, tourist shops, and Greenwich Village eating establishments with menus that never seemed to constitute a meal, all within view of the love of my life: Washington Square Park.

Of course, the shot never made it into the film, but it remains one of my favorite photographs I’ve taken (and I’m no photographer). It encompasses everything I loved about Greenwich Village: the warmth of the coffee shops, the quaintness of specialty stores, the way the beautiful greens of the park contrasted with the greys of the city to create the intersection of nature and human progress.

It also makes me crave green tea and chocolate chip scones.

The creator of XKCD, my favorite webcomic, is officially living my dream.

Le sigh.

I wish I could play guitar. Not because I have any rock star dreams (I’ve got my mediocre abilities on the keys to satisfy that), but because my next-door neighbor sucks and I would like to give him lessons as an investment in my own ears’ happiness. In my wildest dreams, I knock on his door and deliver this monologue:

“Ok, how long have you been playing guitar? If you’ve only been playing a year, then you should know you’re a good five years shy of even THINKING of playing loud enough for anyone except your mom to hear. If you have been playing longer, then you should have realized how talentless you are by now.”

I then take him out Bruce Lee-style, but that’s something for the therapist that doesn’t exist (because I can’t afford him) to figure out.

This morning I was walking my daily route to the library via Washington Square East when in the Northeast corner – far from the siren voice of the man who plays Oasis on an upright base or the startling rattle of the shaggy woman’s spoon across a washboard – I saw two monarch butterflies slumming right there next to the city street. I stopped in my tracks (not for long, I don’t mean to look crazy – thirty seconds at most). I could not place the butterflies there.

New York City is no place for a monarch. It’s hardly the breeding ground of regality, what with grown men pissing on every other corner and children screaming at their nannies and all that shouting the other way around – yet here they were, a king and a queen taking in the sites.

Look at those city folks. They move so quickly! This flower doesn’t taste like it does at home, how interesting.