Paul Mooney Live

Lexi's sister Amy came to visit from the 21st to the 26th. So we all kicked our vacation into high gear. In the past few days we've seen Fiddler on the Roof, The Producers and Paul Mooney Live. We've visited the World Trade Center site, Grand Central, Central Park (on foot, bike and horse drawn carriage), Battery Park, The Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We've eaten at more than a dozen restaurants that even Lexi and I haven't visited yet. All in all I think we had a great time, considering that we had to put up with some thunderstorms.

It's a little hard to process everything and I even skipped editing today to relax after all that activity. These last few days have shown me that there are some huge discrepancies in how hard it is to do some of the touristy things in NY. Visiting the WTC site: free, quick and easy. Visiting the Empire State Building's observation deck: a 2 hour wait on a Monday afternoon with exorbitant ticket fees. Horse Drawn Carriage ride: $50 and there's always one around the south end of the park. Broadway shows: varies. We bought Fiddler tickets 4 hours before showtime with no trouble. However the Lion King had a 3 week wait for any reasonably priced seats.

One experience I definitely suggest is to see a movie at the AMC 25 in Time Square. It's a huge glass building and you can chill on the top floor of the theater, soaking in time square for the cost of a movie ticket. They even have the new ticket dispensers that let you buy a ticket by credit card without waiting in line. Given Manhattan prices and the lack of soda refills, it's pretty cost effective to chill with a huge diet coke on the top floor and just watch the pageant of tourists, street vendors and natives all flow by.

Gotta go to dinner. I'll write more about the shows and such later.

Photos

http://www.seq.org/~acasteel/NY/index.htm

Assassins

We managed to get tickets to the next to the-next to the-last performance of Assassins. I was greatly amused to hear that it was first performed in 92 when the first Bush was elected and was recently revived in the past couple of years (hmmmm.....). It's a great dark comedy and indictment of social inequities. They focus on the sad lives the assasins lead before killing or trying to kill the president. It's very much about the dark side of the American dream. I swear some liberal millionaire must have decided to fund the revival of this play just to spite Bush Jr.

Got to go get lunch,

Bye

Peculier Pub

Tonight I rediscovered beer. Beer was one of the first things to go when I started a diet nine months ago - it's hard to fit good beer into a low-calorie diet. I mean, sometimes I'll have one beer on a special occasion (promotions, weddings, Barry Bonds's 666 home run) but I haven't been out drinking since October. But tonight some friends took us to Peculier Pub (145 Bleecker St.). Peculier Pub claims to have over 300 beers available. Now, I generally expect an average bar to have some beers I like, and a good bar to have some beers I've never tried. But Peculier Pub has beers from countries I've never heard of. I took a random walk through the menu and was really happy with the results.

During the school year, it's probably overrun with NYU students. But it was not too crowded this time, the bartenders had time to give suggestions, and the music was quiet enough to have a conversation. It reminded me of my favorite bar in Pasadena, Lucky Baldwin's. Lucky's had a few dozen beers on tap on any given night, but rotated semi-randomly through a much larger selection. As college seniors, it was our goal to try every beer available at Lucky's; according to our written records (crayon-marked beer menus), we got through maybe a third of it. Anyway, both places had a similar vibe - the best way to describe it is the sort of place where you wouldn't be kicked out for standing on a table and chugging a Guinness while yelling The Philosophers' Song.

Upright Citizens Brigade

Tonight we went to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater (24th st at 8th ave) to see some improv comedy. They do different shows every night - some nights the improv students do shows, some nights are open mic, and other night are more.. professional? The show was random and pretty funny. For $5, it's one of the best entertainment bargains out there. (I'd recommend this over the Ha Comedy Club, which we visited on Sunday - some of the sets of standup were okay, but the evening was marred slightly by the host mistaking me for a man, and saying that with my fashion sense I was likely to be kidnapped by five gay guys in a van.)

On the way there, we stopped at Tono Sushi (174 7th ave). This was reasonably good, cheap, and fast, and I'd definitely go back. We've been on a random walk of sushi restaurants in the neighborhood, and I still haven't found any place like my favorite 'good' sushi bar back in California (where you're allowed to sit at the sushi bar as long as you want, and the sushi guy hooks us up with free stuff when he's bored) or my favorite 'cheap' sushi bar in California (where all the rolls are $1 during happy hour, 5-7 on Tuesdays). Most of the sushi around here seems fine - it's not cheap (but nothing in Manhattan is, so that's expected), but the quality is generally good, there's usually reasonable variety, and they're always open late. Monster Sushi (158 W 23rd) has some interesting (and huge) rolls and a variety of sakes. I'm sure I went to Hana Sushi (211 7th ave, near 22nd), but I don't remember anything about it. The one on the corner of 7th and 20th (Meritake?) had good food but not so good service. We went to Sushi Sen-nin (49 E34th, near Madison Ave) once - it's a more high-end experience, both much more expensive and much better food than anywhere else. (The Crazy Dragon roll is astonishing - we'll upload pictures.) The advantage the Manhattan sushi restaurants have is that you can get sushi at nearly any hour of the night, even delivered.

For comparison, on my way to New York last month, I stopped for a night in Salt Lake City, Utah. There are, in fact, at least four sushi restaurants in the greater Salt Lake area. (In a turn of events I would not have predicted, there are now more bars than sushi restaurants there.) I walked all the way across town to find one (don't even ask about the public transit...) to discover that they're only sort of open sometimes, but never for lunch and not at all on the day I happened to be there.

Yankee Stadium

We went to see the Yankees play the Devil Rays today. I learned from my previous experience to take an express train this time. The express train didn't make up for the hour late we slept in, so we got to the game late, and the only seats left were the $10 bleacher seats. Now, I don't have a problem with cheapie bleacher seats, but Yankee Stadium is huge - the view from the bleachers is pretty bad to begin with, plus with people standing in the aisles to get a better view it's almost impossible to see anything. The bleachers are also out in the open, so we were both sunburned pretty quickly. This must be the advantage of buying the $20 nosebleed seats - the view is just as bad, but at least there's shade. Squinting at the seating chart suggests that you have to spend upwards of $50 to get a good view of the game. Yankee Stadium (err... Con Edison Stadium) is also one of those parks where everything is really expensive and there's lots of stupid rules, like you can't bring in backpacks. Hint to stadium owners: If I wanted to blow up your stupid ballpark, I would hollow out my six-inch clogs, fill them with plastic explosives, put the trigger in my pocket, and walk right in (because no guy security guard is ever going to search a girl, much less question what's in the shoes), leave the bomb in the restroom, and detonate it from a few blocks away. Really, it's not rocket science. The only real impact of the no-backpack rule is that I can't bring in sunscreen and a newspaper, so now I'm sunburned. Other ballparks settle for searching your pack on the way in, which works out fine for me - I'm not trying to smuggle food in or anything.

At least the Yankees won. It was an exciting game, although I probably would have gotten a better view from a wireless unit and ESPN.

Sunstroke Film Festival

Damn my bog-dwelling ancestors. I was filming all of Friday, and 5 hours on Saturday and then tried to watch the Sunday Yankees game from the bleacher seats today and it only took 2 hours of sun to run me down. I spent the rest of the day feeling like crap. I wanted to get out and rollerblade or go to the gym, but I guess this is my body's way of telling me to slow down. I have been missing too much sleep this week and I should store it up if I can.

This week besides going to class, I got to watch Rent and Bridges and Tunnels. Rent was OK. I prefer my musicals to be more comical and less tragic. There were all these tragic bohemians. For example, Jai from Queer Eye played a free spirited cross dresser who spends the first act joking around and perking up everyones spirits. Then in the second act we have to watch him die of AIDS. It had too much of that defeatist, Gen-X, "The Whole World is Corrupt but I'd rather hide from it than make the compromises required to fix it". Throughout the movie, the characters hid from themselves, their families and the world. One of the final triumphant moments is when the filmmaker in the play turns down the offer to work in Hollywood so he doesn't "sell out". His character believes in a lot of truly positive ideals, many of which I share. I wanted him to accept the offer. Make some films more people will see and slowly but surely work his ideals into his films. I hate that the play celebrated the lack of patience and the cowardice of his decision. It diminishes the contributioons made by those who are willing to make the compromises required to create real change from within the system.

Sarah Jones' Bridges and Tunnels was great. I wonder what Samm would think about the play. He hates Dave Chapelles style of self-depricating racial humor, but I wonder what he would make of Sarah Jones' racial humor. As the racial differences she chose to joke about are less negative, he may be more approving even though he claims that all racial humor is wrong.

Saturday started with a 5 hour shoot. For 3 hours, I helped my friend Alina shoot interviews for her documentary on happiness. I thought that it was unlikely that people would be willing to stop for 5 minutes a piece in the hot sun to answer questions and then stand still for 10 seconds, however Alina and her friend have a much greater ability than I to draw people into such things. After we concluded her shoot at Union Square, we took the subway down to Battery Park to interview 3 Polish Girls who were paying for their trip around the world by working as street musicians. I had been worrying all week about what to do for my documentary when I saw these 3 girls playing at Union Square with a sign that said "Help us pay for our trip around the world". I made arrangements to meet up with them on Saturday and have them tell their story. It turned out to be a little different from what I expected, but it was still a great story of brash youthful adventure. I got a great 30 minute interview from 2 camera angles and 20 minutes of b-roll of them playing while people watched. More importantly, it gave me the inspiration to create the Academy documentary part 1 for my final project. I hope to get a well lit interview with Jack when he is out here and splice it together with some interviews of my own and the footage we recorded at Sequoia. I'd been worrying about my final film for quite some time as I didn't really have a great inspiration for a narrative film. Once I was able to let go of the narrative format and give myself the chance to pursue a project I've been thinking about for a long time, it was like a huge weight being lifted. Creativity is hard. It's much harder than organizing and arranging, which are my strengths.

That's all the brain spew for tonight,

Good Night All

Limericks of Mass Destruction

When Andrew got tickets for us to see Sarah Jones do a one-woman play, I was a little reluctant. See, I thought it was going to be, like, one of those new age poetry readings (like the bit in Rent where they start mooing), something his film school buddies recommended. But, I figured, everything is worth trying once. (Except for broccoli.) So we went to 45 Bleecker Theater for the Friday night show of "Bridge and Tunnel". It was nothing like what I expected - I was completely blown away by the performance. She does dozens of different characters, switching back and forth between guises at the drop of a hat. She has a really instinctive understanding of the backgrounds of each one - each seemed like it was effortless, not like a performance. The poetry read by each individual character was pretty neat - some was funny, some was serious, all of it was well written. But the one by the young Vietnamese character just reached out and grabbed me - the style and the rhythm felt right, as if all other forms of verbal expression were just shadows of what is possible. It was the first poetry slam I had ever heard, and as I listened to it, it made me really want to write poetry like that too. I mean, I'm not going to quit my day job and move to the village and turn all bohemain, but it's been a while since something new called to me like that.

Anyway, this post is called "limericks of mass destruction" because that's my favorite line from the performance - the main character is warned that the government might investigate his gathering of immigrants reading poetry, and he responds, "what are they expecting to find - limericks of mass destruction?" So, in that spirit, I have one:

The UN once got an injunction
Barring Iraqi weapons production
But what did Bush see
In each bombed city?
Just limericks of massive destruction.

One film down.

Today I edited my first film. I was a little nervous about working in Final Cut Pro as I had so much trouble trying to work with Adobe Premiere. Final Cut Pro feels like iMovie+. It's so intuitive that I was able to finish editing my movie 3 hours ahead of schedule. I'll get a link to it up as soon as I get my DVD player out here.

It's been great to put all my energy into film again. I even find myself getting back into photography. I'm collecting pictures of all the anti-Bush graffiti I can find. I've put some of the pictures I've taken on-line at www.bixel.org/pictures/

Fortunately (and unfortunately) my school is located in the middle of a bunch of the best restaurants in town and they are all still offering cheap prix fixe meals for lunch. I've been torn between hanging with my film school friends and sneaking off to eat at some of the nice restaurants. Today, the cuisine got the better of me and I had some great gazpacho, steak fritte and a peach napoleon for lunch at Steak Fritte. Together it was just $20. Lexi promised that she would sneak off one day and join me for lunch one of these days. Maybe next Thursday.

We've got more shows lined up for this week. Thursday we're off to see Jai from Queer Eye in Rent. Then on Friday we're seeing Sarah Jones one woman show "Bridge and Tunnel".

Well it's getting late. Good Night.

Control Room

Ugh... I was so hung over today... judging from the state of the living room, we polished off a bottle of champagne, a bottle of wine, and most of a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle.. and that's just after we got home. From my previous post, I infer that I also drank beer (possibly in large quantities).

After stumbling out of bed into an awfully bright, warm, and humid day, it became obvious that the afternoon would be best spent indoors in the air conditioning, preferably one without direct sunlight. We went to go see Control Room, a documentary about the media coverage of the Iraq war. It provided an Arab perspective that I hadn't really heard before. The movie is really pro-Al-Jazeera, although it's honest about that bias. It showed a lot of context that cast US actions in a different light than the original western media coverage implied. Like, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. video taken from a wider perspective shows that the square was empty except for the small group of men taking down the statue - regular Iraqi people were too afraid to come out of their houses to watch, so the only people cheering them on were US soldiers.

Their footage of the US military hostages was especially striking. At some point before the tanks rolled into Baghdad, Bush had given a speech where he had said something along the lines of that we were going to find the terrorists or insurgents or whoever and bring them to justice, and that no individual Iraqi would be able to stand behind the defense of 'just following orders'. In the footage of the hostages, the captor asks each in turn why he is in Iraq. Each soldier says "I was just following orders". This doesn't imply that I think the soldiers are doing anything wrong, or that they should have some other answer - I think they are just following orders, and somebody higher up the chain is ultimately responsible for the actions of the military as whole - but I thought the counterpoint was food for thought.

I'm not sure what I think about Al Jazeera. I should probably watch some of their actual broadcasts before forming an opinion about them. But they showed real consequences to the war even when the US told them not to, and I figure that's probably a good step forward for journalism in the middle east.

July 4

It's July 4, and we've worked through several bottles of alcoholic substances. (The "Three Philosophers" Belgian beer was excellent - I think we found it at the grocery store on 8th near 23rd.) I am drunk enough that iambic tetrameter seems like a fine transport mechanism for tonight's entry.


I stood on the apartment roof
And watched the world implode in light
Some drunken Irish serenade
As I absorb the sounds of night

Some helicopters fly above
I wonder if they see us there
Or, if we are just ants to them
Up in the sky without a care

The sound rips through the ashen sky
It fills me with a sense of pride
As fireworks of red white and blue
Illuminate the riverside

It reminds me that I'm lucky
To celebrate with friends and beer
So even if we're still at war
At least the bombs aren't falling here.

Avenue Q

We went to see Avenue Q tonight. It was hilarious! I am firmly convinced that puppets make everything funnier. (The puppet episode of Angel is one of my favorites.) Avenue Q is about puppets trying to find their purpose in life. One is a recent college graduate with a degree in English with no job prospects; another is a closeted gay Republican investment banker. There are puppet sex scenes and songs like "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist". There's even a whole song about schaudenfreude. It's definitely one of my favorite musicals so far.

Afterwards, we went to Ben Benson's Steak House for dinner (123 W 52nd, between 6th and 7th). The prime rib steak was one of the best steaks I've ever eaten, and was big enough to take home half for later. The decor is really old-school and classy. It's pricey, but worth it.

One film down, 3 to go this weekend

Today we finished our first two continuity films. I got to play the absent minded professor in Boyette's movie. It only took us 3 hours to shoot that scene. We've still got 3 movies to shoot this weekend so Saturday morning/afternoon and Sunday morning are shot.

Still I'll have a chance to hang with my east coast friends tomorrow and have a nice picnic Sunday night (hopefully).

It's hard to fit in all the fun with all the work. Last night I was out rollerblading for two hours with Lexi after a full day of class. We met a roller-dancer named Greg who gave us some free rollerblading lessons. The portrayal of New York as a rude city is definitely unwarranted. We've found most people on the street to be much more outgoing than many of the people we meet in California. I think it has to do with the very compact nature of the city. In San Francisco, more people drive or take the train than walk. You are usually on your way to a get together, which requires you to drive/bike or take the train. As such, you don't have as much opportunity to mingle with everyone else on the street. It's a refreshing change to have so many people walking around outside their personal bubbles.

It's off to Avenue Q. So long