Marathon Manhattan Film School

Holy Shit! I didn't expect film school to be this intense. I suspected that it would be 9-6 each day with no homework. It's turned out to be 9-6-occasionally-9 and I have to give up a day and a half this weekend to do a continuity film project. I'm learning a lot, but I wanted to have more time to have fun. I'm trying to work my personal schedule around my film school duties, but it is going to be difficult. On the bright side, I like all of my classmates and I've been having a great time with them, when we aren't exhausted. Rob, Maria and Sarah are dropping by this Saturday and I hope that I can get away from filming long enough to hang with them.

I've decided not to pay the overinflated gym prices and just rely on walking and other exercise this summer as I've had hardly any time outside of school and painting the town red with Lexi. We went to Hairspray yesterday, which was a blast. I love live theater because the show can change and respond to current events. The actors were joking about the possible broadway strike and about how Bush stole the election in 2000.

Gotta go to get enough sleep for tomorrow.

Bye

Frick Collection

On Saturday, I went to the Frick Collection (1 E70th Street, near the park). It's this gorgeous old mansion where Henry Clay Frick put his personal art collection. Every available surface is covered with art, plus there are free-standing statues. It's smaller than a regular museum - it was house, if a big one - but all the art is good. You know how sometimes you go to some museums and there's a whole room with nothing in it but a toilet and a sign declaring that it (the toilet, not the sign) is Meaningful Art? There's none of that here. Henry Clay Frick had good taste. (Or, possibly, 'modern art' meant something different in 1900.) They said that almost half the stuff is from his original collection - the directors don't replace pieces often.

One of the unique things about this collection is that it's mostly "happy" art, like it would be pleasant to have hanging over your dinner table. (My dad once bought a painting depicting a battle scene that somehow involved bleeding horses, and insisted on putting it in the dining room. Eating steak became much more difficult with the painting there. Eventually my mother relegated the painting to the basement.) One room has a lot of landscapes and portraits of very serious people - but in the middle of that is Jean-Baptiste Greuze's "The Wool Winder", which is of a girl trying to wind up a ball of yarn, except a kitten is tugging on the loose ends. That's my favorite. The kitten looks so playful, and there's a remarkable amount of detail that brings the painting to life.

There's also a self-portrait by Rembrandt. And that got me thinking - how did artists do self portraits back then? Did they even have mirrors in the 1600s? I guess they probably did. But still, it seems hard to hold a pose and paint it at the same time. So maybe he was guessing about what he looked like, or painting the picture to be the way he wanted to look.

Some of the artists did really clever things with light. In The Education of the Virgin, the candlelight casts sharp light on one subject but a softer, diffused light on the other subject. But it all looks really accurate - better than 3D rendering programs do today.

My favorite portrait is the one of Thomas More. In most portraits, the person is usually looking off into space sort of blankly, or maybe smiling. In this one, Thomas More has this profound look of resignation, like there's a really good baseball game on but somebody has told him he has to sit right there until the painting is finished, and he's tried very hard to argue his way out of it, but finally given up.

This is a fabulous collection all around, and the century-old mansion is a great comfy setting for it.

Straight to TV

Hello, this is Andrew on Lexi's account (blogger's slow to email me my access to this blog). For a first day in New York, today was not bad at all. After a nice brunch as Nisos (176 8th Ave.), which serves up a lot of new age diner cuisine (club sandwiches with brie and the like), we did some shopping for a pair of rollerblades for me. My first attempt to skate was cut short as we could not get to the park because of the gay pride parade. Undaunted, we decided to get some tickets to Fahrenheit 9/11 and then find a new park to practice. It just happened that Michael Moore was giving an interview at the theater right then. I couldn't get a great picture of him, but I did get interviewed by NY1 and was shown on the nightly news giving an excellent elocution of a rather bland sound bite. Though we arrived at the theater a little after 3pm, we couldn't get tickets for anything earlier than the 8:15 showing, which isn't surprising now that we found out it made box office records as the first documentary to outgross its competitors on opening weekend.

With the 4 hours we had before our showing, Lexi did her best to help me get the hang of rollerblading. I fell twice. Managed not to run into anyone. And somehow got a bruise on the arm that I didn't land on? It's like the right and left sides of my body have that same thing the Crimson Twins from GI-Joe had going on. Apparently I can hit a pole at full speed with my right arm and get a nice purple bruise on my left. It's quite disconcerting

After two hours of practice, we stopped for dinner at Cosi (841 Broadway), which specializes in artisan bread sandwiches. It was a restaurant that most closely resembled my dream restaurant. Those who have had the dubious pleasure of dining with me have probably noticed my propensity for eating the crust off enough bread that I can't eat the actual meal I've ordered. This place serves a bread that's mostly golden, crispy and slightly seasoned crust along with something else so that you have something to put on it. For all you other epicrusteans out there, it's a do-not-miss dining experience. It's cheap and casual so it would make a great lunch spot.

Everyone should see the film, regardless of how liberal/conservative you are. Michael Moore may be a liberal propagandist, but he is a damn good one. Out of all the film tries to accomplish, I think it is most effective at personalizing the war against Iraq. No matter how many paper trails you dig up that prove Bush is a greedy, lying puppet of industry, nothing will convince people of the barbarity of his acts like footage of an iraqi child crying as they stitch his scalp back on or a burnt American corpse being beaten and then hung up by an angry mob. Now we're home. I'm slightly sunburnt and absolutely exhausted from 2 hours of rollerblading practice. Lexi's slightly tired from waiting for me to catch up to her every half block and not at all sunburnt. And we're both trying to get to bed early so we can start work/school tomorrow. Which is still hard for me as Cali time has yet to loosen its grip on my biorhythms.

Good Night,

Andrew

Marijuana-logues

My husband Andrew has joined me in New York, now that he's done teaching for the year. He'll be posting too. Everybody say hi to Andrew. :)

We went to Greenwich Village to try a sushi restaurant recommended by some friends. Sushi Samba (87 7th Ave South, near Barrow) is sort of what you'd expect, for a sushi restaurant that has a website that plays music. The cuisine is Japanese/Brasilian fusion, which means that you can get mango on your sushi or tuna in your ceviche. (Mango-eel-avacado sushi turns out to be pretty good.) So there's a lot of variety on the menu, the atmosphere is good, and the food is tasty - but it's definitely more expensive than regular sushi.

This restaurant did give me my first-ever experience of looking at a wine list and recognizing something I had previously tried at the brewery where it is made. Hakusan Plum Sake is a sweet, mellow sort of fruity sake. The Hakusan Sake Garden, where it is made, is in Napa and happens to open for sake tasting at 9 a.m. - an hour before any other wineries in the area open for tasting, which is why I have tried it. It comes in the big bottles (750ml), not the little bottles, so our valiant attempts to finish the bottle tonight were thwarted by a lack of coordination needed to pour the last of the bottle into the sake glasses.

Across the street from Sushi Samba is the Actor's Playhouse, whose current feature is The Marijuana-logues. We'd seen them do a segment on Real Time with Bill Maher, and figured it would be pretty funny. It's a great live show - they improvise some, and there are some really good bits. My favorite went something like this: "People say the body is a temple. Well, I'm not religious - so if my body is a temple, it's empty, and I rent it out to demons to have wild parties."

Golden Chicken, Ribs, and Steak

Golden Chicken, Ribs, and Steak has cheap and tasty chicken and ribs (and, I assume, steak - but I haven't tried that yet). It's at 604 9th ave (near W43rd). $5 buys you a huge sandwich plus a side, or a quarter-rack of ribs plus a side. You can watch a hundred chickens cooking on their grill while you wait; the chicken sandwich was full of moist, flavorful chicken (I'm too used to dried-out overdone fast food, I think.) This could be addicting - the menu is long and varied. While I've been trying not to eat at the same place more than once (to ensure that I sample as many different restaurants as possible), this is one place I'll be going back to.

Speaking of places to go back to, I pass the Breadstix Cafe (254 8th ave, at W23rd) most days on my way to work. I have discovered that I'm a complete sucker for freshly-baked cookies - every time I walk past, I smell something new and have to go in and try it. Yesterday I discovered the magic of the black and white cookie - they're big soft poofy cookies with two kinds of icing. Unfortunately for my diet, there appear to be dozens of different kinds of cookies in this bakery. At least there's a gym across the street.

Rent

If you physically show up at the Nederlander Theater (W41st near 7th) on Sunday, you can buy half-price tickets for Rent for upcoming weekday performances.


(I think the ads at the top of this page - for stuffed antelopes - are absolutely hilarious. Go, AdSense!)

Bryant Park Summer Film Festival

There are free movies in Bryant Park (on 40th between 5th and 6th - 42nd/Bryant Park station) on Monday evenings in the summer. This week's movie was American Graffiti. Boy, Harrison Ford must be old now if he was young then. I acquired a tasty roast beef sandwich at the Pea Soup Deli (on 5th near 39th) and picnicked in the park.

Shea Stadium

I woke up on Sunday with a sudden desire to watch a baseball game, so I hopped on the subway and went to a Mets game. First, I'd like to point out that the subway map implies that Flushing is only a couple of miles away from midtown Manhattan, just a short subway hop away, when in fact it is, like ten miles away, and the one subway line that goes out there makes absolutely every stop possible, occasionally stopping the middle of the tracks just for fun. Now I know there is theoretically an express on the 7 line, but I have yet to see proof of its existence. (There was construction this weekend, so waybe this was just bad timing.) It took most of an hour to get there. Fortunately, I had my trusty Sunday New York Times with me - I was able to read most of it, round trip.

Shea Stadium is a pretty good ballpark. Unlike some ballparks, where the third deck goes all the way around the field and the cheap seats are a mile up and in the outfield, Shea's third deck goes only from foul pole to foul pole - so the cheap seats are mostly a mile up and in the infield. On my first visit to a new ballpark, I usually get the second-cheapest kind of seat - the very cheapest are really hit-or-miss, and the more expensive ones are usually a lot more expensive and not much better. Here, the $23 seats had a decent view - I was almost directly behind home plate, waaay above it. Shea also has a distinctive lack of blinky things and blaring pop music, making it much easier to watch the game.

This was the first time I've seen the Mets play in person. When I moved to California, I became a Giants fan, but long before that, my first love was the Mets. I remember in 1986 (as a little kid) being glued to the television set, holding up the bunny ears with tinfoil wrapped around them just so to get reception, watching the World Series. I was certain that when I grew up, I was going to be just like Darryl Strawberry, and play for the Mets. My hopes were dashed when it was pointed out to me that they don't let girls play professional baseball; shortly after that, I discovered computers and never looked back. But it was cool to get to see them.

First Post

I started this blog because I wanted somewhere to write down the locations of interesting things, and I keep losing my pile of receipts that formerly held this information. I'm a native Californian, but I'm working and living in Manhattan this summer. It's my first visit to New York ever (notwithstanding a brief tourist jaunt with my parents when I was ten, which does not count), so everything is new.

I figured living in New York would be different from living near San Francisco. I prepared by watching lots of Law and Order (the good ones, not the new ones). I knew that nobody drives a car because there's too much traffic. I knew that life in an urban apartment would be louder, and stuff would be happening all the time. I left my car in San Francisco and acquired a pair of inline skates.

But it's not the big differences (functioning public transit, readily available non-fast-food at 3 a.m., humidity) that I noticed first - it's the little ones. Like, the New York Times has different sections if you get the late New York edition instead of the California edition. There's a Metro section with weather and TV schedules and ads for local businesses (like the one where a bunch of good restaurants offer cheapie prix fixe lunches for a few weeks). There's no half-assed attempt to include items of interest to Northern Californians. The Saturday paper has an enormous Arts and Leisure section with event listings. (The Saturday California edition is tiny by comparison.)

Oh, wait, I said I was going to write down the location of something interesting. OK. Today I went to the American Museum of Natural History in the morning/afternoon (Central Park West at 79th, has its own subway station at 81st on the A-C-E line). There were frogs. Lots of frogs. And these huge dioramas of animals in their native habitats. I've never seen whole stuffed animals before - it was really neat. Did you know there's more than one kind of antelope? To the extent that I had ever thought about it (not much), I'd figured antelopes were all basically the same. But there are dozens of different species of antelopes just in Africa. They all appear antelope-like, but they have different numbers of horns or stripes or polka dots (wait, no, those were deer).

After a stop at Macy's (6th ave at W34th, Herald Square) to pick up an outfit that did not involve blue jeans, I went to see Stomp at the Orpheum (126 2nd Ave, near 8th - I left the subway at 14th and 3rd on the L line because I wanted to walk; there is a closer station). In an odd coincidence, there is also an Orpheum theater in San Francisco - I saw the Lion King there on June 3. Anyway, the Orpheum here is a pretty small theater but the acoustics seemed good. Stomp is all about celebrating the sheer fun of making noise with things that are not supposed to be noisy. (Come on, I'm not the only one who saw this and remembered my eight-year-old self pulling all the pots and pans out of the cupboard and banging on them with chopsticks, right?) The show was tons of fun.