Self-Aggrandizement: Culture Consumption Archives

Let the Flames Begin
Filed March 12, 2008 3:49 PM.

As previously mentioned, I'm dangerously susceptible to television. Turn one on while I'm in the room, and I'll watch it, no matter what's playing. Commercials, re-runs of Full House; it doesn't really matter.

But, at the same time, there's relatively little I'd be too upset to give up. No more American Idol? I'm pretty sure my life would go on.

There is, though, one exception: Bravo's Top Chef, which starts a new season this evening.

Prior to discovering the show, I already considered myself a bit of a foodie, having eaten my way through much of New York, taken an array of cooking classes, and stocked up on key kitchen gadgetry. But over the course of even my first month of Top Chef episodes, I found myself appreciating cooking, really appreciating cooking, in a way I'd never before.

It was Top Chef that led me to read Heat, The Making of a Chef and Kitchen Confidential, that got me subscribed to Cook's Illustrated, that got me taking wildly over-long and over-expensive culinary school professional development courses (thank you, thank you, Jess!).

And, more than anything else, it was Top Chef that led me to an ever-deeper exploration of the principles of cooking, rather than simply cooking recipes rote. This weekend, for example, when testing out a new red wine and mushroom pan sauce for the flank steak I pan-roasted, I could puzzle through how much stock to use to balance out the wine pre-reduction, knew to toss in shallots, mustard, and balsamic vinegar to balance tastes, could explain why I chose to 'monte au beurre' as a final step.

In other words, I've now moved past 'foodie' and into 'total asshole'. And I have Top Chef entirely to thank.

Tonight at 9:00 on Bravo. Bon appetit.

Tickets Please
Filed December 14, 2007 4:45 PM.

An inside tip for any New Yorkers whose taste for cultural events exceeds their budget for cultural events: join play-by-play.com.

The idea is simple: theatre producers don't like empty seats at their shows, as it makes people wonder whether they made the right choice in shelling out big bucks for tickets. So producers turn to services like Play-by-Play to fill unsold seats.

Conversely, theatre-goers can join Play-by-Play for $100 a year, then pay $3 a pop for any of those seat-filling tickets.

The obvious question is: what kind of crappy production has to resort to free seat-fillers?

And the answer is: surprisingly many.

Yesterday, Jess and I scored tickets to Things We Want (directed by Ethan Hawke, and starring Paul Dano and Peter Dinklage), which we'd long wanted to see. As those two tickets would have run us north of $150 on Ticketmaster, the annual cost of Play-by-Play membership paid itself off in a single evening.

This Saturday, similarly, we're off to see Molissa Fenley and Dancers premiere Dreaming Awake and Calculus and Politics at the Joyce; another $80 saved.

What else can you find? Some Broadway, more Off-Broadway, and even more Off-Off. Plus dance, music, comedy, staged readings, and the like. For $100 a year, it's a hard deal to pass up.

Screen Player
Filed December 11, 2007 6:18 PM.

Given my job, it's a bit embarrassing to admit that I rarely watch movies. And I don't mean rarely watch them in theaters - a common condition; I mean rarely watch them at all.

There was a time, early in the life of Cyan, that I was cranking my way through a good five or six a week - my own little Good Will Hunting hundred bucks of Netflix membership rather than hundred thousand of NYU tuition film school. By now, if I see one movie a week, I'm doing well.

Terrible, I know. And much as I wish I could blame this on Jess, she watches many more movies (and reads more books and magazines, is generally just far better informed on both popular and high culture) than I.

I have no good excuse. Sure, long work hours, helping run a gym, work and play social obligations, etc., all make it tough to block out two solid hours of time at a stretch. But lots of movie buffs have waaaaay crazier lives, yet seem to make it work.

So I'm particularly glad that, in the last four days, I've seen two movies. Even better, I've seen two movies in theaters. Granted, one (The Golden Compass) was a disappointing atrocity, and the other (The Great Debaters) might have made even Lifetime viewers roll their eyes. But still, I watched them! The whole way through! Both of them! Mere days apart!

Even better, for the first time in months, there are scores more movies out I really do want to see: Juno, The Savages, No Country for Old Men, just to name a few. So I'm trying to build this new momentum, to get back in front of a big (or at least small) screen ASAP. If nothing else, as one of the few people who can write off movie tickets as a business expense, I figure I should do my best to abuse that privilege.

Take Me Out
Filed September 4, 2007 4:34 PM.

My wily brother rounded up excellent free tickets to tonight's Yankees / Mariners game. So he, Jess and I will be headed off to the ballpark to drink bad beer, eat sketchy hotdogs (assuming we've recovered from the even sketchier hotdogs served yesterday at Colin's Labor Day BBQ), and generally revel in the nearly deciding game of the close American League wild card race.

Play Ball.

[Also, beginning this evening and carrying on through the balance of September, I'll be doing my best to make up for my irregular blogging by instead at least briefly moblogging via Twitter and Flickr. Oversharing narcissism knows no bounds.]

Tele-tard
Filed April 6, 2007 8:19 PM.

As previously extensively blogged about, I wasn't really a television watcher before I met Jess. When she moved in, however, for the first time I had cable installed in my (or, rather, our) apartment.

Jess watches relatively little TV. And, when she does, it's mainly as relaxing background noise while multi-tasking: replying to emails, paging through magazines relevant to her job in the world of fashion design.

I, however, am far less able to healthily cope. Sitting at our desk, with my back to the screen, I find myself frequently swiveling around to catch more of what Heidi, say, might be saying to Spencer on the latest episode of The Hills. I even watch the commercials. And then I try to discuss them with Jess, who, having built more effective defenses against the tube, stares at me blankly, having completely ignored such unwanted interstitial content.

I don't know if I'll develop similar immunity with practice, or if I'm simply congenitally unable to sit in a room with television playing and not pay attention.

Either way, though, at least for the time being, if anyone needs to know exactly what Sanjaya said to Paula this week, or who does the Marshall's celebrity voice-over, I'm pretty much your go-to guy.

Book It
Filed January 9, 2007 12:09 PM.

Jess moved in bearing largely two kinds of items: clothing and books. And while, fortunately, my apartment has ample closet space, leaving room for both her and my own (albeit now slightly more compressed) apparel, I had previously filled my own large bookshelf to near bursting, leaving certainly no room in which to store her many, many tomes.

So, to accommodate, we added a second bookshelf and some magazine baskets, commandeered a section of windowsill for library lineup. And, in the process, I also started going through all of my books, to see what I wanted to keep, and with what I might be willing to part.

And while it turned out, unfortunately, that I did want to keep most of my books, I also discovered there were a rather shockingly large number I had never finished, or, worse, even begun. Apparently, armed with an Amazon Prime account, my eyes are bigger than my literary stomach, with even my relatively voracious pace of book consumption falling steadily behind my pace of online book accumulation.

So, making a belated resolution that, in all honesty, I still won't be able to keep: no new books until I catch back up on the old ones. Or, at least, no new books until I'm satisfied having simply judged each unread one by its cover instead.

Tooting their Horn
Filed December 7, 2006 12:00 AM.

This evening, headed to a special joint concert between the New York Philharmonic and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. The two played, respectively, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, and Duke Ellington's arrangements of the same music, switching back and forth to allow the audience to compare the original classical and more newly jazzified versions of each movement.

As the concert also included Copland's El Salon Mexico, it gave me the chance to hear featured playing from two of my favorite trumpet players in the entire world: the NY Philharmonic's Phil Smith, and the JLCO's Wynton Marsalis.

As ever, I headed home not sure whether to start practicing, or give up playing the trumpet completely.

Guest Blog: Josh Lilienstein on Medeski Martin & Wood
Filed October 4, 2006 12:21 PM.

With recorded music ever easier to find, fewer and fewer people take the time to go see their favorite groups perform live. Which is a shame, because a good live show is an experience completely unmatched by disembodied sounds floating out of living room speakers. My old friend Josh Lilienstein recently emailed along this summary of a MMW concert he attended. I'm posting it up here in the hopes that it will get a few more readers out of their chairs, and into clubs, bars and concert halls.

If you go see one popular band this week, this month, this year, or this decade, these guys should be on your radar. When was the last time you saw a concert where all three members of the group (plus the special guest) were ALL incredible musicians? When was the last time that you heard improvised music that made a crowd get up and dance? When was the last time you saw a jazz concert where each of the musicians onstage traded off leading the group, instead of trading solos?

As soon as i could find a musical reference, they were on to the next. Ellington degenerates into chaos which is rescued by funk slipping into blues, at which point the guy on the standup bass grabs his bow, hits the reverb pedal, and launches into Hendrix, soaring into a Miles Davis bebop breakdown and across the Florida keys to mid-century Cuban dance hall, shimmies out to Mariachi shores and back-to-Africa tribal chants, dropping the bass into some deep house, devolving into 80s metal, with country western rock and roll gracefully saving the day, and Indian raga bringing us back into downtown New York jazz. And that was just the first song. They played for two hours.

Medeski, the keyboardist, is a master of his craft. He actually used, often in ridiculously complex combinations, three keyboards, a moog, a sequencer, a sound board, and a record player. Often, in order to somehow account for genius, we imagine that impressive people had been born in the wrong decade; thankfully, this guy was not. Using a historically-informed musicianship and contemporary instruments, he shows up an entire generation of DJs and computer geeks.

The Bros holla'ed. The tube-top girls grinded. The fat man clapped and jumped along. The hippies twirled. The stoners passed joints with a smile. The intellectuals bobbed their heads while scratching their chins. Something for everyone!

When was the last time you saw a drummer who was subtle? Who had a real dynamic range? Who used every snap, crackle, bop, wheeze, and thump he could think of to move the music instead of making noise?

When was the last time you really wanted to hear the bass, and actually could? Have you ever seen a standup bass played like a Stratocaster? Ever head a saw (yes, a saw, placed on the bridge of the bass so it resonated) ROCK the party?

Those of you who were involved in improvisational music thirty years ago need to see the fruits of your movement. Those of you who feel alienated from popular culture need a reality check. Take your kids. Get high. You musicians out there, go get inspired.

[Catch an upcoming MM&W show near you.]

The Results
Filed March 7, 2006 9:29 AM.

The First Annual Cyan Pictures Oscar Pool has come and gone, and, in the process, I've actually learned a number of things:

1. The crowd is smart.

Together, we correctly predicted 17 of the 24 Oscars.

2. Smarter than even our best entrant.

Still, congratulations to Jennifer Kearns, who, with 16 right answers (and missing only Crash for Best Picture in the eight 'big' categories) won the pool.

Also, 'congratulations' to Seanna Davidson, who, with 5 right answers (but still somehow getting Crash for Best Picture) was at the very bottom of the barrel. While, arguably, that means Seanna should be sending me movies, we're sending her a prize pack as well; clearly, she's in need of some good movie watching.

Jennifer and Seanna, shoot me an email to claim your prizes.

3. And way smarter than the average entrant.

Although, together, we got 17, on average, each of you only predicted 10.7 Oscars correctly.

4. Smarter than me.

Misled by my crush on Amy Adams in Junebug, I was in the (reasonably large) crowd of folks who would have tied for second with 15 predictions.

5. But not smarter than my mom.

While this last one pains me to no end, had she entered (rather than simply mocking me from afar), my own mother, with 19 predictions (including Best Picture), bested me, our winner Jennifer, and our collective wisdom.

As she emailed to say, "so when you want advice on movies…"

Wisdom of the Crowd
Filed March 4, 2006 4:30 PM.

As promised, here's your collective wisdom on who's going home with statues tomorrow night.

In cases where the runner-up was within 5% of the number of votes, I've included both to account for margin of error. That happened on only two categories: Best Actor, where people were nearly perfectly split between Hoffman and Ledger, and Best Live Action Short, where people were clearly pulling decisions out of their asses.

Interestingly, the most unanimously decided category was Best Documentary Short, and I'm fairly certain no more of you have seen those shorts than the live action ones. Still, stick 'Rwanda' in the title (as in God Sleeps in Rwanda, which garnered 78% of your votes) and it's got to be an Oscar contender.

Check back on Monday to see how we did together, and to determine which wise voter led the pack.

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain (71%)

Best Director: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain (70%)

Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Capote (52%), Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain (48%)

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line (63%)

Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney for Syriana (44%)

Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz for The Constant Gardener (51%)

Best Original Screenplay: Crash - Paul Haggis (41%)

Best Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain - Larry McMurtry (45%)

Cinematography: Brokeback Mountain (56%)

Editing: Crash (48%)

Art Direction: Memoirs of a Geisha (37%)

Costume Design: Memoirs of a Geisha (59%)

Original Score: Brokeback Mountain (41%)

Original Song: "Travelin' Thru" - Transamerica - Dolly Parton (40%)

Best Makeup: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (66%)

Best Sound: King Kong (49%)

Best Sound Editing: King Kong (71%)

Best Visual Effects: King Kong (69%)

Best Animated Feature Film: Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (67%)

Best Foreign Language Film: Paradise Now (Palestine) (48%)

Best Documentary Feature: Murderball (42%)

Best Documentary Short: God Sleeps in Rwanda (78%)

Best Live Action Short: Our Time Is Up (32%), Cashback (30%), Six Shooter (27%)

Best Animated Short: Moon and the Son (33%)

On Bygone Days
Filed March 1, 2006 4:40 PM.

My senior year in high school, AP US History fell during the same period as jazz band. And, Louis and Miles being nearer and dearer to my heart than any dead president, I opted for jazz.

While I've never regretted that choice, I've often regretted the deep hole in my knowledge that resulted. What was, for example Truman's legacy? Or Harding's? I have absolutely no idea.

Over the years, in fits of self-improvement, I've therefore picked up a slew of US history texts. I've tried to slog through Loewen and Zinn. I've even resorted to Davis' much maligned Don't Know Much About History. Because, as I've said, I don't.

But, despite my best intentions, I'd never make it more than fifty pages through any of these tomes. I'd sit down to read and my eyelids would droop before I could even crack the volume open to the right page.

So, it was with some trepidation that I picked up Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, which retells the story of the 1893 World's Fair by intertwining the perspectives of Daniel Burnham, the fair's lead architect, and Henry Holmes, a serial killer who used the fair to lure in his victims.

As one reviewer commented, Larson seems a historan with a novelist's soul. Several other reviewers called the book 'engossing'; I couldn't agree more, having, in less than three days, devoured three hundred and forty-some pages - more, perhaps, than I've read of all my prior history reading attempts combined.

So, if you like history books, I highly recommend The Devil in the White City. And if you don't, I recommend it even more.

Quick Movie Reviews
Filed October 19, 2005 3:08 PM.

Very good.

Very not.

Audible
Filed June 7, 2005 11:21 PM.

At the same time that I picked up the now-carried-everywhere Shuffle, I also picked up Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Or, more accurately, I downloaded it, as an audio book from the iTunes store. It was my first audio book purchase, and buying it felt like I was cheating. Like I had eschewed a classic novel for its Reader's Digest summary. Technically, my download of Freakonomics was unabridged. But without its crinkling pages in hand, without its black words racing past my saccadic glances, it still felt, well, less than the actual book.

Worse, it still felt less than actually reading. As if, by taking in the Steves' work through my ears rather than my eyeballs, I was missing the most important part, was divorcing myself from the long, grand history of letters, was undermining my aspirations to the snotty literati crowd.

It turns out, however, that there's historical precedent for such aural affairs: until the twelfth century, nearly all reading was done alound. Saint Augustine, for example was shocked to discover that when Ambrose, bishop of Milan, read, "his eyes followed the pages and his heart pondered the meaning, though his voice and tongue were still." Even reading privately involved quietly speaking the words aloud, leading Ivan Illich to describe the monasteries of his time as 'communities of mumblers'.

Indeed, at that time, reading was an inherently social activity, not the solitary one that it's since become. As David Levy describes in his excellent Scrolling Forward: "for many centuries... if you read aloud, you were likely to be reading to others. And those listening were themselves considered to reading - not because they were looking at the text, but because they were hearing it."

Or, in the words of Ivan Illich again, "all those who, with the reader, are immersed in this hearing milieu are equals before the sound."

Equals before the sound! I like that. And, it turns out, I like audio books as well. I can read them walking down the street or jostling through subway cars, can play them by stereo while mopping the kitchen floor, and can stuff them, in bits and pieces, into the small gaps throughout my day.

This past weekend, I picked up Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything - which, unabridged, belies its name with a seventeen hour playing time. After that, I have an Audible.com wishlist slowing filling up with any number of auditized volumes I'd love to listen through. I'm immersing myself into Illich's hearing milieu, and I'm going in deep.

Soothes the Savage Beast, Redux
Filed June 6, 2005 5:08 PM.

Two weekends back, as celebration for closing out Long Tail's first round of financing, I bought myself an iPod Shuffle.

Ostensibly, I bought it to take to the gym, because professional bodybuilders (a significant part of Mid City Gym's clientelle) apparently have musical taste on par with their fashion sense (way to keep Zubaz pants alive, guys!), and because my trusty 60-gig model weighs enough that I unintentionally occasionally pants myself when moving quickly while carrying it in my gym shorts pocket.

I assumed I'd still use the 60-gig outside of the gym, as I've by now filled it to near capacity with a full month of tunes. But, it turns out, even really, really long subway rides (read: going to Brooklyn) are shorter than a month. And during most of them, I put the 60-gig on shuffle anyway, chunking through unexpected swaths of my collection.

So, since I shuffle most of the time anyway, and since I tend to head out for just a few hours at a time, I decided to try taking the Shuffle with me around town, instead of its big brother.

My conclusion: the Shuffle is, well, small. Small enough to be virtually weightless, to leave no strange bulge when pocketed rather than messenger-bagged. And, most importantly, small enough to encourage me to carry it literally all the time, rather than just on certain bag-carrying long-tripping occasions.

So now, full-time, I wander the streets earphones-in. I can barely hear the sounds of the city around me, and I miss them far less than I'd have ever thought.

scrobbled
Filed January 25, 2005 12:20 PM.

People tend to assume that, since I spend much of my life immersed in one genre of pop culture, I must be, at least to some degree, hip to the world of pop culture as a whole.

Which, sadly, is not the case. While I do, obviously, follow the film world closely, I tend to follow it from the making movies side, rather than from the star obsession / People Magazine side, leaving me embarrassingly behind on whether Brad and Jennifer are together or not at any given moment.

Beyond my own industry, things go downhill quickly, leaving me clueless as to new television shows, recently released novels, or hot new indie bands. In the case of TV, I'm somewhat happy not to know the latest reality hit. With books, as most of my friends tend to be serious bibliophiles, simply watching what they're toting along for subway reading is enough to make sure I catch any fast-spreading paperback meme before I'm too distressingly behind the curve.

But music. That's a tough one. I do, I believe, know a number of people with really good musical taste. But unlike reading choices, the contents of their iPods aren't nearly as easily gleaned from casual observation. So, instead, I tend to follow the offhand comments of my most music-savvy friends, snapping up the names of bands and albums they mention like a dog hungrily collecting table scraps. Which works. But in a slow and haphazard way that leaves me to miss entirely bands and musicians I'd really like, and to search through the large number of mentioned groups that aren't even vaguely up my alley.

Here, as in so many other areas, it seems I may be rescued by technology. Rescued, in fact, by technology I discovered and installed several months back, but then promptly forgot about.

Like with most things in the world of music, I may be one of the very last to discover AudioScrobbler. But, on the off chance that some small number of you readers lag even further behind, I highly, highly recommend that you download the plugin for whichever audio player you use.

In short, AudioScrobbler watches what you listen to, compares it to what other people listen to, and make recommendations based on other artists people with similar tastes are playing frequently. Last night, on AudioScrobbler's advice, I downloaded a slew of Denison Witmer, Sufjan Stevens and Rufus Wainwright. And, frankly, I was shocked by how much I liked them all.

With those successes, I'll be checking in on AudioScrobbler's recommendations every month or two, and acquiring some new CDs. I may not be any hipper or better tied in to the indie music world, but, with a bit of help, it looks like at least I'll be able to fake it.

focked up
Filed January 10, 2005 6:09 PM.

In his excellent, if curmudgeonly, essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction," David Foster Wallace argues that TV "is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

Which, frankly, is probably the best explanation of how, last night, three college friends and I ended up pigging out at Virgil's Real BBQ, then sneaking 40's of malt liquor into a screening of Meet the Fockers.

joy never ending
Filed September 1, 2004 6:10 PM.

While I love the feeling of accomplishment in finishing reading a book, if I'm enjoying a read - and, particularly, if I'm enjoying a novel - I tend to look with dread at the swaths of pages disappearing to the left. With each turn, I get closer and closer to running out of story, to no longer feeling the constant tug of the book, away from what I should be doing, begging me to curl up, read a chapter, and then another.

That's why I'm particularly glad I've enjoyed the first hundred pages of Anna Karenina (one of the many classics I somehow missed in my years of education). With literally hundreds and hundreds of pages yet to go, I have days of reading left before the fear of running out taints purely enjoying the unfolding narrative.

filmic wisdom
Filed July 23, 2004 8:58 PM.

I'm in the Newark Airport. I have been here for the past eight hours and, according to the most recent departure time update, I should be here for at least two more.

With each passing minute, I'm increasingly cursing myself for having not yet seen The Terminal, as I'm pretty sure that, if I had, I'd know how to use this stretch of airport time to bed Catherine Zeta-Jones.

brain food
Filed July 2, 2004 10:07 PM.

I recently finished reading a pre-release copy of Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs' wonderful upcoming book The Know-it-All, which, in short, follows Jacobs - concerned that he's become steadily stupider over the decade since graduating college - on a quest to counter that trend by reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, cover to cover. The Know-it-All is a surprisingly absorbing read, beautifully blending lessons Jacobs pulls directly from the volumes with the day-to-day impact his quest has on the rest of his life, on his relationships with his wife, colleagues, family and friends.

I enjoyed the book immensely, though I must admit it also brought forth from the back of my mind a similar fear of slow decline since a collegiate thinking peak. These days, I'm thrust into situations that make me think, and think hard, just often enough to remind me that I don't think hard nearly as often as I should.

I blame that, in large part, on no longer owning a car. Or, to be more precise, on no longer owning a car radio.

I've never been a big radio listener outside of the driver's seat, but, on the road, throughout high school and college, NPR almost never left my radio dial. With each short drive, I'd pick up a small dose of Fresh Air, the World, Marketplace or All Things Considered, any of which never ceased to occupy my imagination.

Certainly, I knew full well that, as a teenage guy, listening to NPR lifted me to nearly unparalleled levels of dorkdom. But I didn't care. I loved it. I could almost physically feel my brain filling up with new facts and ideas, delivered fresh each day over the airwaves.

In standard New York style, however, I sold my car before moving to the city, and with it the only radio I owned. That was the end of NPR for me, save for short trips out west, when, in cars rented or borrowed, Terry Gross and Bob Edwards once again brought me up to date on the world. I knew that I could theoretically find any of those programs at home, archived online, but, frankly, I was too lazy to do so - I wanted my information pushed, not pulled.

Then, a day or two back, I downloaded a copy of iTunes. I did it mainly because, starting at the end of next week, I'll be working part-time on a borrowed Mac for a nonprofit consulting project. And, with my trusty Dell laptop slowly disintegrating, I've also been toying with the idea of making the Mac switch full-time, trading my Dell for a Powerbook G4 and returning to my Apple roots. I downloaded the Windows version of iTunes as a baby step in that direction, a chance to ease my way into the rounded corners and aqua blues of the Mac world.

Overall, I've been fairly impressed with the program. But I was ecstatic about it this afternoon, when I clicked on down to the Radio icon in the left sidebar, just to see what was in there. Ambient, Americana... then, about two-thirds the way through the list: Public.

I clicked. Lo and behold, a veritable cavalcade of NPR stations! I recognized the third on the list, KCRW, from my LA rental car driving, and hit the play button. Instantly: Cory Flintoff, at 128 kilobits per second.

I am not too proud to admit I literally jumped around the room. By another miracle of broadband, NPR will, once again, be flowing back into my brain. Which, frankly, is excellent news, because my apartment doesn't have nearly enough shelf space for an edition of the Britannica.

to do
Filed June 24, 2004 3:15 PM.

Go see Fahrenheit 9/11, now in previews here in New York City, and playing on a nearly hourly basis, all through the day and night, at the Loews on 3rd and 11th. It will change your life.

talent?
Filed June 7, 2004 1:19 AM.

Sure, everyone's been pointing out inappropriately that Harry Potter's young Emma Watson is on the road to babe-dom. And, while after catching the latest Potter installment this weekend I completely agree, I should also redeem my entitled 'I told you so' by pointing out that I totally called this a year and a half back.

Just further evidence of a creepy talent for scouting out on-the-rise prepubescent actresses, considering I similarly praised Lindsay Lohan six years back, for her performance in The Parent Trap.

As one might expect, this leaves me feeling both a little proud, and a lot dirty.

Going Solo
Filed June 6, 2004 9:09 AM.

Given the frequency with which I watch movies (an occupational hazard), and given that I often see them during the work day, in far-flung cities while traveling, or at last-minute to accommodate my overpacked schedule, I rather often end up at the theater alone.

Some people hate watching movies by themselves, and, at first, I must admit I similarly felt vaguely embarrassed about it, as if everyone pouring into the theater was taking a moment away from their crazed seat search to pity the poor friendless loser parked in the middle of an otherwise empty row. I'd glance at my watch regularly, scanning the incoming crowds as if to say, 'now, where is my friend (or perhaps date) who's likely arriving late or simply coming back from the bathroom, because, I mean, I'm certainly not the sort of poor friendless loser who would have to see this movie alone."

Over time, though, the embarrassment waned. I stopped the friend-search charade (because, honestly, the only thing more loserly than being at the theater alone is being there with imaginary friends), and started simply settling into my seat. I began to appreciate pre-movie time, a rare few minutes in which I could simply sit on my ass without feeling like I should be doing something other than just vegging out.

By now, I've reached the point where I often prefer seeing movies alone. For me, at least, there's something intensely personal about being immersed in a film, and being snapped immediately back into the real world as the credits roll is tough enough without gratuitous post-mortem dissection discussion. Perhaps I'm just a slow thinker, but even when I do want to critique a film, I often feel I need to weigh it mentally for a day or two before crystallizing an opinion.

Which is all to say, basically, that if you see me in a theater, parked like a poor friendless loser in the middle of an otherwise empty row, leave me the hell alone. I'm happy there by myself.

opus de funk
Filed May 1, 2004 11:28 AM.

Headed out to the Blue Note last night to catch legendary jazz pianist Horace Silver who, in his late 70's, is still in prime form. Though the venue was packed, the group I was meeting (members of a jazz octet with which I play) had arrived early enough to get a table directly in front of the stage, so I ended up sitting about five feet in front of the piano, directly in Silver's eye line.

Silver pulled up one of his classic compositions, "Song for my Father", early in the set, and as I had played the same piece earlier in the day at a lunchtime jam session, my fingers were unconsciously moving through trumpet fingerings along with the music. He saw me doing so, winked at me. And for the rest of the show, Silver shot me sidelong glances whenever he did something he was particularly proud of - working bits of Rachmaninoff or "When John Comes Marching Home" (aka "The Ants Go Marching Two By Two") into his solos, laughing to himself about it along the way.

Most of the rest of the group were younger guys, in their twenties and thirties, and Silver clearly relished the enthusiasm they put forth. "That's right," he'd shout, in the midst of their solos, "that's how you say it!" And, indeed, that was how you say it, as the group laid down funky jazz line after funky jazz line.

I'd not seen Silver play live before, and, as he and many other jazz icons are aging rapidly, I wanted to catch him while I still could. It was indubitably worth it, in part to simply hear such great jazz being played right in front of me, in part to see that, no matter how seriously the audience was taking his playing, Silver wasn't taking it seriously at all, was simply jamming his heart out and having a hell of a lot of fun.

back to the books
Filed April 27, 2004 1:14 PM.

The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children's Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone - it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts - but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn't much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I'd pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I'd go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was - in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start - I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I'd never read. I'd pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I'd replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I'm on my fourth book of the past week. And I can't help but think those Children's Library librarians would be rather pleased.

archetyping
Filed February 26, 2004 1:20 AM.

This past weekend, watching the last Sex & the City, part of me was thinking: "Thank god this thing is ending; the show's gone so far downhill this is basically a mercy killing. And clearly Carrie's ending up with Big. I could have called that from the first episode." Yet, another part of me was thinking: "Thank god Carrie's ending up with Big, because if she doesn't, I'm utterly fucked."

Truth be told, from that first episode, I identified with Mr. Big. Or, rather, I identified with his archetype, the broader class of Bigs who show up in film after film: Jack Nicholson's Harry Sanborn in Something's Gotta Give; Pierce Brosnan's Thomas Crown in the remade Thomas Crown Affair; any of cinematic history's laundry list of men who too late discover the same traits that made them moguls led them, in their personal life, to push people away, to end promising relationships abruptly, to bounce from fling to fling with no apparent end destination in mind, finding increasingly little joy in each.

While I may only be starting out on the route to mogul, I'm already well seasoned in ending good relationships for bad reasons. Which is why I'm always secretly thrilled by the redemptive endings Hollywood inevitably lays out for these characters. It's an odd relief to find one somehow changing his spots, reconciling his romantic streak with his inability to actually sustain that romance. The happily ever afters let me tell myself: if that's the path I'm heading down, at least it ends up somewhere good.

and all that jazz
Filed February 23, 2004 2:03 PM.

At most of the jazz gigs I play, the audience is predominated by late-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white couples, the sort who golf clap after each solo, chortling "oh, I say, wasn't that delightful!"

Every so often, I'm lucky enough to play a bebop gig up in the heart of Harlem, where I'm the token white kid in a band otherwise comprised of wizened black guys in their 70's, guys who wear bowler hats and say "hep", "cat" and "like, dig." There, the audience is little old black couples, who shout "mm hm!! mm hm!!" or "yeah! come on!" while we're playing.

Nowhere I play, however, do I see many young people. Sure, there are a handful of twenty and thirty year-olds at any gig, but they're almost invariably musicians themselves. I'm not sure why my peers have never discovered jazz, though in part I suppose it's the fault of jazz musicians ourselves, who somehow let music once synonymous with defiant, up-yours cool become instead synonymous with soothing elevator rides.

Still, I don't think today's musicians hold all the blame - even while the Brittney Spears of the world dominate popular radio, for example, people in their twenties and thirties continue to dig back into rock of the '60's and '70's. For some reason, however, almost none of them are digging into (or simply digging) that era's jazz.

But, in many ways, jazz was far enough ahead of it's time to have less in common with rock of the time, and more with today's indie rock. Lo-fi? Miles Davis practically invented it. Ironic hipster cool? Check the unimpeachably wonderful names of Charles Mingus compositions, like "The Shoes Of The Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers." Or perhaps more in common with today's hip hop - Herbie Hancock's thirty year-old releases, which fathered both funk and fusion jazz, are some of the most used sources of samples, hooks and beats.

So perhaps there's hope for jazz after all. Perhaps the fact that jazz now lives relegated to Starbucks sampler CDs and Sophomore year faux-sophisticated hook-up music playlists represents the darkest hour just before dawn. After all, at several points in jazz's century-long history, the art has been prematurely autopsied, declared DOA just before some new innovators lifted it back up to new heights and new public recognition.

If any music is about comebacks, about the quintessentially American-ness of rising, Phoenix-like, from one's own ashes, jazz is it. So I have hope. Or, at least, faith. Faith that, even without people looking for it, jazz good enough to revive the medium would find listeners. Find people who may not know exactly what they're waiting for, but will know it when they hear. People who will, for the first time, understand Louis Armstrong's timeless description of what makes jazz: "Brother, if you have to ask, then you'll never know."

moratorium
Filed September 22, 2003 2:51 PM.

On a slightly lighter note: this past weekend, I spent about an hour going through my overflowing bookshelves, weeding out those books I knew I'd not read again but might be able to put to good use at the New York Public Library. In the process, I not only pulled nearly fifty donatable tomes, but also some twenty-six other books I had either not finished or never even started, but would still really love to read.

Resultingly, I've consolidated those twenty-six onto a single shelf, and have effected a new-book purchase moratorium until I plow through those plucked lost gems. Based on the way I scarf down books, I don't expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.

versification
Filed August 28, 2003 9:45 AM.

Arriving uptown last night fifteen minutes early for a rehearsal with my jazz septet, I popped into the neighboring Barnes & Noble to waste time wandering the piles of books. Thumbing a few in the "New Releases: Poetry" section, I was suddenly and intensely reminded that I love poems, that I have since at least kindergarden, and yet have somehow fallen almost completely away from reading them.

With a bit of reflection, I was unhappy to realize the reason: over-education. Too much time deconstructing poems, picking apart the nuances of their language in an attempt to second guess the writer's intentions and unintentions, had almost entirely robbed poetry of the joy of pure and simple reading. So, to remedy that, I'll be falling back on the suggestion of Poet Laureate Billy Collins: reading a poem a day. Not analyzing and discussing. Not "unpacking". Just reading. Reading and enjoying.

Don't worry; I won't be subjecting you all to those daily poetry choices. (Not most of the time, anyway.) But, on the off chance that some of you might similarly be inspired to rediscover a lost love of the form, here's one to kick things off, by Laureate Collins himself, that sums up rather perfectly the bind poetry finds itself in today.

Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Let the Flames Begin Filed March 12, 2008 3:49 PM.

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Screen Player Filed December 11, 2007 6:18 PM.

Take Me Out Filed September 4, 2007 4:34 PM.

Tele-tard Filed April 6, 2007 8:19 PM.

Book It Filed January 9, 2007 12:09 PM.

Tooting their Horn Filed December 7, 2006 12:00 AM.

Guest Blog: Josh Lilienstein on Medeski Martin & Wood Filed October 4, 2006 12:21 PM.

The Results Filed March 7, 2006 9:29 AM.

Wisdom of the Crowd Filed March 4, 2006 4:30 PM.

On Bygone Days Filed March 1, 2006 4:40 PM.

Quick Movie Reviews Filed October 19, 2005 3:08 PM.

Audible Filed June 7, 2005 11:21 PM.

Soothes the Savage Beast, Redux Filed June 6, 2005 5:08 PM.

scrobbled Filed January 25, 2005 12:20 PM.

focked up Filed January 10, 2005 6:09 PM.

joy never ending Filed September 1, 2004 6:10 PM.

filmic wisdom Filed July 23, 2004 8:58 PM.

brain food Filed July 2, 2004 10:07 PM.

to do Filed June 24, 2004 3:15 PM.

talent? Filed June 7, 2004 1:19 AM.

Going Solo Filed June 6, 2004 9:09 AM.

opus de funk Filed May 1, 2004 11:28 AM.

back to the books Filed April 27, 2004 1:14 PM.

archetyping Filed February 26, 2004 1:20 AM.

and all that jazz Filed February 23, 2004 2:03 PM.

moratorium Filed September 22, 2003 2:51 PM.

versification Filed August 28, 2003 9:45 AM.