I want to make a few changes around here. Thus far this blog has been a platform for sporratic personal musings. This, of course, will continue.

But I would like to make this a little more friendly to the New York crowd and, frankly, a little more useful. I’m going to start posting about events around NYC, restaurant/music/movie/book/venue reviews, and other Manhattan-related blurbs. Basically, I would like this to be a lifestyle blog for the geek (or geek chic) trying to keep themselves busy in the city.

The consequence? Less crappy poetry, more useful articles, and possibly more media in the form of pictures, videos, and MP3s.

I recently bumped into this guest post on one of my favorite blogs, The Park Bench. I had no idea anyone else felt this way about learning:

After graduating college, I still underlined sentences in books I read
and wrote in the margins to the point where I can’t loan anything out
these days without checking it first for embarrassing or revealing
notations. I walked down the aisles of office supply stores, delighting
in the tummy thrill I felt at being near shiny paper clips! Post-it
notes shaped like fish! Or folders in all the colors of the rainbow!

Those
toys of the student impart more than just nostalgia. They signal the
aura of school and education and the learning that revitalizes our
senses, wakes up our brains, and changes our perspectives. Learning
forces us to pay more attention and in doing so, start seeing the
things we were taking for granted and embrace their charms again.

I try to explain this phenomenon to some of my friends, but they look at me like I’ve just joined some kind of cult. I don’t understand how people don’t like to learn. How can one sit through an entire class of any subject and not take any notes or pay attention? In high school, I would be astounded at how many student just didn’t care. In college, where most of my classmates are better off financially than I am, I can’t believe my eyes when I see them drift off to sleep during a class that is costing them thousands a year.

For me, learning is not just about wanting to “pay more attenion and in doing so, start seeing the things we were taking for granted.” It is about being aware and informed so that every decision we make is an educated and well-thought one. Whether this is in buying a used car or voting for a president, one is much more likely to be taken advantage of if they have less knowledge backing up their decision.

And learning doesn’t have to take place in school. Check out your local library. As cheesy as it sounds, they’ve got some fantastic stuff there. Go on Project Gutenberg and read something published before the 20th century. Wikipedia the shit out of life. Or, if you’re really lazy, Googling something new is a start.

Just don’t let the world go by making decisions for you. You have just as much right to think for yourself as anyone else.

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.

While I didn’t get a chance to watch the Tony’s (ok, who am I kidding… I never watch the Tony’s), I did get to see Mark Rylance’s quixotic acceptance speech. Instead of thanking his mom, hairdresser, and producer’s personal assistant, he launched into an obscure prose poem, “Back Country,” by Louis Jenkins. Since the lit crowd and the award show junkies seldom mingle, the recitation came out more like an intentionally crazed rambling. Which was perfect.

More perfect is one of the facts about poet Louis Jenkins that The Times decided to share with its online audience: “He has been a truck driver, fisherman, librarian, guard, gardener, and shoe salesman.” The Times’ article also contains the full text of the acceptance speech and a self-indulgently clever commenter who noticed the similarities between this and Andy Kaufman’s (in?)famous Gatsby reading.

I’m back home in Massachusetts for the summer , dreaming neon as I wait to get back to the city and my now-comfortable routine… A routine that requires bagel joints to stay open past 5pm or at least exist.

My mum (who bases her votes on the military experience of a given candidate) likes to blare right-winged radio loud enough to remind herself of why she sometimes strays to the left with her votes on issues like civil liberties. This, combined with the the fact that I’m stuck in a fellow suburb that can’t be pronounced correctly on the first try, means that I’m currently hearing the whole “pregnancy pact” story from Gloucester at least twenty minutes every hour.

Didn’t you hear? Diablo Cody personally knocked up over a dozen teenagers.

That’s right. There’s been no end to the banter on talk radio, blogs, and those coffee shops you go up intending to get a quick egg and toast order but slowly walk out of when you realize its clientèle consists entirely of 80+ year-old men. The conclusion is unanimous: the supposed pregnancy pact fulfilled by over a half-dozen teenagers in Gloucester, MA is a result of their enjoying the Cody-penned teen pregnancy comedy, Juno. It’s funny to hear the same folks that praised Jason Reitman’s indie hit for its implicit pro-life message bashing it just as fervently as a brainwasher of innocent children’s minds.

I could give the usual counter-argument to this ridiculous assumption that media affects our children’s actions: parents should be watching these films with their kids or sheltering them, parents are responsible for monitoring their kids’ behaviors, etc. etc…. But really, I don’t see the point in this case because personally I found nothing offensive in the movie in question.

This brings me to real topic of this post, the top five reasons Diablo Cody didn’t get your child pregnant:

1. Juno in no ways “glamorizes pregnancy.” While the protagonist herself is hip beyond imagination (she has a hamburger phone!), it’s clear that she goes through an extremely emotional ordeal in choosing to go through with her pregnancy. There are no glamorous shots of her holding her child, no instances where she seems happy about the fact that she is pregnant itself, and certainly no high-fives from friends who made a pact that they’d get pregnant together so that they could by matching strollers in school colors.
2. Juno doesn’t keep or even interact with her baby. The adult woman with a home and a secure job is shown as the ideal parent in the end.
3. Even adult parenthood isn’t glamorized. The relationship between Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman is torn apart because even with all of their financial resources they weren’t ready to handle raising a child together.
4. The pregnancy in the film is unplanned. Michael Cera wasn’t looking for an heir.
5. As a female, Cody doesn’t have sperm.

The NYT says it all.

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

Le sigh.

Life: 1

Romantic Comedy Endings: 0

Nothing gives me a good chuckle like fake news involving Bush, Dumbledore, and astronauts.

Is it difficult in an article about the success of an oil giant to point out where that giant is getting some of its success, or that many are divesting the company because of its practices? The New York Times is reporting that PetroChina hit the trillion dollar mark. No mention is made of PetroChina’s support of Sudan, a country that is killing its own citizens by the thousands.

I seldom follow business pages, so I’m not sure if it is standard practice to leave out anything unflattering in a report. I understand that a reporter should only mention what is germaine to their article, but this doesn’t seem too unrelated. It’s disappointing that more isn’t said about Darfur in everyday news, outside of letters to the editor that everyone else skims over. Could it be that the Times is afraid of the big, bad oil company? Or am I just naive?