The Daily Show

Last week - on June 29, 2010 - Asit kindly let me tag along with him to a taping of The Daily Show.  It's the first time I've ever gone to see a TV show recorded and it was a pretty interesting experience, though most of the comments I'd make fall in line with general chatter I've heard about what happens when you get too close to the magic of modern media.

Here's the door into the theater (the sign reads: Abandon News, All Ye Who Enter Here - gotta love the Dante reference):

And here are our fancy, high-security tickets into the taping:

They say 25 and 26 but I think they really meant 125 and 126, or 225 and 226...whatever the number, we still got inside.  We had reserved spots but they overbook every show so if you want in, you have to show up early and wait around.  I think we waited for about 2 hours.

We were shown into the theater probably half an hour before taping started.  We settled down and then the self-described "warm up monkey" came out to loosen up our laughing muscles and also warn us that, as the show's only laugh track, it was our solemn duty to laugh loud and often.  The price of entry, as it were, given that admittance was otherwise free.

If you watch The Daily Show, you know that Jon Stewart makes a habit of chatting up his audience before the show starts.  The chatting up is pretty carefully timed - I think it lasts about two minutes - he came out when the warm-up monkey was done and took a few questions.  It's a neat way of going a little above and beyond, being generous with his audience, but also, I think, a way for him to warm himself up.  Our first question was about his favorite cheese, so we mostly got a long monologue on the subject of cheese.  His favorites are semi-soft, and he thinks jack cheese should not be loaded up with foreign objects like pepper.

The thing I noticed most, once taping got started, was how obvious it was that Jon Stewart is acting.  Watching on TV, his manners and gestures always seem very natural to me - of course I know that he's acting, and the shows are very obviously scripted and carefully constructed, but I've always had the impression that I'm watching Jon Stewart more or less be himself.  And maybe that's true, or maybe that's not - clearly I'm not qualified to judge, since I have no standard of comparison - but sitting in the live audience, it was very obvious that his constant gesturing, raised voice, and focused intensity are unnatural.  That it's not at all like having a conversation with a normal person, not on TV, where arm-windmilling and mugging for the camera would be disconcerting instead of hilarious.

I've heard actors say that before, that taking up space and moving your body on and off the stage are different things, and complain that non-actors lack affect.  We don't choreograph our thoughts and emotions with our bodies, or at least we don't do so intentionally.  The result is that "normal" body language looks very dull and wooden on TV, I think.

Other than that, the taping was pretty quick - not surprisingly, it lasted exactly as long as the show does - there wasn't much delay as people or props were ushered on and off the set, or cameras were moved about.  The guest was Helen Mirren, which I found terribly exciting.  She was gracious and gorgeous, and she looked like a breath of fresh air in a sleek black sheath with a little tie-front white shrug on.  The interview, however, seemed pretty stiff to me, and she didn't linger once it was over.

So there you go, a little run down of being an audience member at The Daily Show.  It'd be interesting to  check out a few other live tapings, just to make the comparison, and it was interesting to see the set - it looks just like it does on TV, but somehow less impressive.  Definitely a fun thing to do, and I recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to attend.

Brooklyn Photos

Kids playing in front of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; they're leaning over a fountain

Koi feeding frenzy at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

 

Witty graffiti.  I love this kind of conversational graffiti - like person who wrote it is trying to make a little offhand comment to all the other people in the subway.  It brings New Yorkers together.  This one's an ad for vodka.  The text reads, "Our ambassador Paul tried it. And he was all 'This is so good I would bathe in it.' So being the marketing guys at 42Below, we let him. Is that so wrong?"  So the grafitti artist wrote, "It is if your vodka 'is so good'."

Hubris

The New York Times has these ads running around town right now.  I know people who find the NYT motto "All the news that's fit to print" unbearably  arrogant, but as a mission statement I think it's excellent.  It's ambitious and bold and...oh yeah...it's about their desire to cover the news.

These ads, on the other hand, are just narcissism.  As though, for some reason, the New York Times wants to position itself as the Paris Hilton of news organizations.  

Can you believe this is a Dunkin Donuts? It is.

In Carroll Gardens, on Court Street.

West 70th, Looking North

Two Views of Central Park

Central Park from the Green  

Central Park South, view from the Mandarin Oriental above Columbus Circle

Pest Control

You know what would be a great way to get rid of cockroaches in the city?  Subsidized dishwashers.

Just think about it for a second.  Cockroaches are abundant here because there's plenty for them to eat.  There's plenty for them to eat because there are a lot of tired, less-than-meticulous people who let dirty dishes pile up in their sinks. 

If the city subsidized the cost of dishwashers, and strongly encouraged every apartment in the city to have one installed, those tired, less-than-meticulous people would do their dishes more often, the cockroaches wouldn't have so much to eat, and their numbers would diminish.  Not disappear - but I bet we'd cut down the problem.

This is one of those ideas that would make people angry because, you know, why should the city government help people purchase luxury items like dishwashers?  But there's a good answer: it would save the city, and all the landlords and homeowners, a lot of money in the long run.  Right now the city Health Department has more than 80 full time employees who do nothing but pest control...although apparently they're cutting the number in half for next year.  And that's not to mention all the money spent on pest control services.

What makes this idea even better is that it would be popular.  Who doesn't want a dishwasher?  They make life a lot easier.

celeb sighting

He was eating dinner at the same restaurant I was, but I didn't notice until he walked outside to smoke a cigarette and stood right by the window where I was seated.

I was surprised someone as famous as Philip Seymour Hoffman felt comfortable standing around on a busy street for 5-10 minutes, but nobody bothered him.

We're a well-trained city I guess.

moving on

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Catherine Opie show at the Guggeneheim with Diana, and then yesterday...

To the William Eggleston show at the Whitney with Prue.

I'm learning how to go to museums just for pleasure. To tell the truth, it took me a long time, but I'm finally getting the hang of it. It's a very different experience - in some ways diminished, in others enhanced. Without a sense of duty motivating me I want different things from art - I want to be engaged, I want to be entertained, I want to enjoy the experience of looking. I don't feel the need to persevere when I'm bored.
I'm tempted to ramble on now - about persevering through boredom. That's what separates the professionals from the amateurs isn't it?

Instead, I'll just say that I enjoyed both the Opie and the Eggleston exhibits. And that last night, I made baked apples and they turned out really well. I cored the apples and plugged the base of the hole with chopped raisins, then filled up the rest with brown sugar and cinnamon and butter. Baked the apples for half an hour and they turned out perfectly. Baking apples is easy and nothing to brag about but I came up with the chopped raisin plug myself and was kind of proud so I'm mentioning it now.

My Halloween costume. It's not much of a costume, I admit. What you can't see is that I had on little fake fangs on. I learned something interesting from my experiment with fangs: vampires, if they existed, would have a really hard time wearing lipstick. Because my lipstick kept rubbing off on my fangs. It was not cool.

Also: yay classic ghost costume.

Salome

So I just saw the weirdest opera ever.  Richard Strauss' Salome, at the Met.  I don't know about you, but personally, I just don't associate "The Metropolitan Opera" and "Weird".  Avant-garde?  Sometimes.  Abstract?  Sure.  Gaudy, over-the-top, and spectacular?  That's more like it.  But this one was weird.  And disgusting.

There's not a whole lot of story here.  Salome is a spoiled brat, and she's lingering outside at a big party at her stepfather's palace when she hears John the Baptist ranting and railing from inside his oubliette.  The soldiers guarding the oubliette have been ordered not to let anyone speak to John the Baptist, let alone pull him out of his little prison, but with a bit of bump-and-grind Salome convinces the guy in charge that he can bend the rules just this once.

Here's the weirdest thing about Salome.  It's that Salome herself, history's ultimate femme fatale, isn't the least seductive.  And I don't mean this as a slam against the opera singer, either; the choreography is so awkward it has to be intentional.  She doesn't dance; she jerks around, she squats, she humps the props.  She doesn't seduce the solider; she flashes some flesh in a cheap, vulgar way and he just can't resist.  If that weren't bad enough, there's something childish about her mannerisms which makes the choreography that much more repulsive.  

So out pops John the Baptist.  He's not in a good mood.  The one really fun part of the opera comes next: Salome tells John that he has beautiful white skin and asks if she can touch it.  John says no, you skanky ho, you can't touch my white skin.  And then Salome declares that actually, his skin is digusting and ugly and she doesn't want to touch it.  She starts again on his beautiful red lips, but John's still having none of it, so Salome declares that actually, she never wanted to touch his ugly red lips anyhow.  Etc.  That was cute. 

Eventually spoiled little Salome gets tired of John and sends him back to his oubliette.  Then her stepfather, the tetrarch, shows up.  He's got a crush on Salome; his wife, in tow, keeps telling him how inappropriate this is.  She's wasting her breath.  The tetrarch asks Salome to dance for him, and after several refusals he resorts to bribery: if she dances for him, he'll give her anything she asks for, absolutely anything.  Salome agrees.

Salome has already established her credentials as a provocatrice at this point.  She did a little octopus dance with the soldier to convince him to unearth John the Baptist, wearing a slinky silver cocktail dress, but this time we expect more.  We expect her to pull out all the stops for the Dance of the Seven Veils.  How's that possible?  With a strip tease of course!

No.  Seriously.

And yeah, she takes off the bloomers too.

Interesting, huh?  And while Salome gets nakeder, she's still jerking around on stage in this deeply unappealing, awkward way that makes her look like she's having convulsions.  Or doing aerobics.  Convulsive aerobics.  It's bad.  And weird.

So she finishes her dance and the tetrarch is delighted.  He immediately starts offering her all the riches of his kingdom.  Clearly, he is insane, because these days most guys working minimum wage can afford a classier routine.  But fine, Salome's horrid striptease is worth diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and other such magnificence.

But Salome refuses it all.  She just wants John the Baptist's head on a silver platter.    

Now, you might be thinking the worst is over.  You might be thinking that surely an opera at the Met can't get more risque than an opera singer just past her prime stripping down to the buff on stage.  You might be thinking it can't get much grosser than those aerobic convulsions.  I sure did.  

You would be wrong.

Because once Salome gets John the Baptist's head, she kisses it.  And not just a little peck on the lips, either.  She drops to the floor and rolls around with the head, locked in a passionate embrace with it.  She's singing this thoroughly psychotic song about how she finally gets to touch his white skin and kiss his red lips, as though she can't tell the difference between a live person and a severed head.  Truly, all the previous uncomfortable moments in the opera combined are less uncomfortable than this one.  

The end.

Conclusion: wtf?

Equus

I went to see Equus a couple of weeks ago.   I knew nothing about Equus the play - nothing about the playwright - I only knew that Daniel Radcliffe, little Harry Potter, was in it and at some point, he would prance around on stage naked.

Now, it's true: it's severely creepy for a 27 year old woman to be leering at naked 19 year olds, especially tiny, young-looking naked 19 year olds like Daniel Radcliffe.  I guess there's no getting around it.  And although I wasn't attending in order to ogle him - for pure ogling potential I'm sure I could have found something better - my motives were essentially perverse.   I just wanted to see Bad Harry Potter, the same way spending four years at a Catholic high school makes me giggle at tasteless jokes about Jesus.

Actually, I just looked up perverse and here's the number one definition: willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired; contrary.  So I guess guess perverse really sums it up. 

Here are some observations about my perverse excursion:

1.  There's been so much press about the nude scene, but it's short, the stage is dark, and Daniel Radcliffe is not facing the audience for most of it.  Forget about the nude scene.  What about the scenes when Daniel Radcliffe is twining himself around strapping young men wearing horse-heads and showering them with big, open-mouthed kisses?  If you ask me, those were much weirder.

2.  I didn't bother to find out what it was about before I showed up and, hey, it's kind of depressing and intense.  Go figure.  The playwright said his goal was to try to make sense of a senseless crime - something he heard about, although he never did track down the real event, if it ever occured.  Namely, a teenage boy who blinded six horses at a stable where he had been working, by stabbing them in the eyes.  He comes up with a fairly elegant, and inspiring, answer; too elegant, and too inspiring, if you ask me.  Or maybe I just don't care if there's some sort of indomitable spirit motivating animal torturers; nothing good comes of it, after all.

3.  Sure, I bought the ticket for silly, gimmicky reasons.  But I didn't go see a silly gimmick; I saw a great play.  I walked in with a snicker and walk out enlightened and thoughtful.  What's the lesson there?  That sometimes even your worst instincts can send you off on worthwhile journeys?  Maybe that's not a good lesson.  

4.  I got two Harry Potter actors for the price of one: the main character, the child psychologist treating Daniel Radcliffe, was also the guy who plays Uncle Vernon in the films.  He did a truly fantastic job, really great.  

5.  On the other hand, he also kind of reminded me of what Albus Dumbledore would be like, if he were a 20th century child psychologist treating severely disturbed teenage boys.  Harry Potter Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

6.  Captain Janeway had a role too.  She has nice calves.

Halloween

I wasn't out for long yesterday, but I did see a man dressed as a banana.

I passed him on my way to the gym, where I discovered - to my great delight - that all of the toned-to-perfection gay staff had put on teeny tiny togas to celebrate the holiday. Thank you, toned-to-perfection gay staff of Equinox, for playing the objectification card both ways, and thank you, Halloween, for making it possible.

New York Navel Gazing

Last weekend I also made a trip to the Queens Museum of Art. I'd never been before (most likely because it is, as one might imagine, in Queens) to see a pretty interesting exhibit about Robert Moses curated by my once-upon-a-time undergrad thesis advisor, and the scale model of New York City pictured below. Since then, I keep telling everyone I know to go to the Queens Museum of Art to see the model...especially anyone who's only been in the city a few years, because the model can help you see the forest instead of the trees...it can give you a sense of the size of the different boroughs, where they are located, where population is concentrated. The model shows all five boroughs, at a scale of one inch to one hundred feet, and walking around I could find individual buildings at Columbia, and the street where I live now.


Looking from the Upper West Side of Manhattan south and east.


Looking from eastern Brooklyn to the west - Manhattan in the distance.


Looking from Queens south - with an excellent view of La Guardia airport.

Trivia: the General Assembly first met in the room that currently houses the scale model of NYC.

Second piece of trivia: Did you know that the Statue of Liberty faces Brooklyn? Or that this is because it looks in the direction of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major battle of the Revolutionary War?

Upright Citizens Brigade

OK, stay tuned for further posts but this one is fresh in my mind, so it goes first. Last night I went to see the Upright Citizens Brigade.






I had no idea what this was, so I was really pleasantly surprised. It's an improv comedy institution...at the beginning of the show, somebody from the audience calls out a word and then one of the improvers delivers a monologue based off of the word. Then, after that's over, the other improvers make up skits based off of the monologue. The monologuer did two monologues for each word, and they ran through the cycle four times.

I have been to bad improv before, and I have been to ok, that was fairly funny improv before, but I have not been to awesome improv before and all I can say is - if you want to see awesome improv, go to the Upright Citizens brigade. The comedians there last night were...

Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live)
Seth Meyers (Saturday Night Live head writer)
Jack McBrayer (30 Rock)
Scott Adsit (30 Rock)

And a couple of other really funny people whose names I don't know off the top of my head and can't look up on an NBC website.

I don't know if you have ever tried to get tickets to Saturday Night Live, but I have looked into it and you have to send in a postcard in August (only August!) listing three dates you'd like to attend during the upcoming year, and then you are put into a lottery and maybe you will get seats sometime during the next year, hopefully on one of the dates you specified. Or you can show up at the studios really really early in the morning on a Saturday and stand in line and maybe get any tickets that have cropped up from cancellations or whatnot, if they are available and you are not too far back in the line. And then be ready to stay up late because Saturday Night Live is, I believe, actually live.

This show was free (free!), although you can also reserve in advance and pay like $8. It doesn't take a year's advance planning or trudging through the snow in the wee hours of your precious weekend, hoping against all hope that you're the only person insane enough to do it. On top of which, the theater is teensy tiny and it's really fun to see a lot of incredibly talented comedians improvise. Plus, everybody was free to be as foul-mouthed or inappropriate as they liked, which was also pretty fun.

I'd try to sum up some of the skits but I imagine they're only funny when a funny person tells the story/does the act. Humor is mysterious that way.

ALL THAT I WILL EVER BE

Melinda and I went to an amazing play last night - All That I Will Ever Be, by Alan Ball. It was great for a lot of the same reasons that people would say American Beauty and Six Feet Under, other Alan Ball projects, are great - it was dark without being despairing, topical without being preachy, simultaneously familiar and strange, funny.

I didn't know anything about it when I bought the tickets - just that it had been written by Alan Ball, and the program didn't have even the briefest plot summary, so I sat down as a blank slate. It was basically about a Middle Eastern hustler and the relationships he forms with clients. The hustler is played by this guy, Peter Macdissi:

It's a really meaty role, and Macdissi does a phenomenal job. The playhouse was pretty small, and we had good seats, so we were pretty close to the stage. A lot of the time, you see an actor in person and it's sort of disconcerting that they're so human-sized. One of the things that makes theater so special, and so difficult, is that the actors don't have huge projectors or elaborate settings to enhance their impact on the viewer... they're just people, standing a few feet above all the other people in the audience. Macdissi is a big guy but I felt like he just got bigger and bigger and bigger until he was gigantic, outsized, totally filled the stage.

I don't think that cinema can really come close to the intensity and physical charisma a good actor can project in theater - because it's so immediate, because it's a moment in time that can't be repeated or repaired, because there is a physical connection when a body is performing in front of you. Acting is physical, corporeal, and that is...thinned out, mediated, through film. This means that a bad play is ridiculous. But a good one grabs hold of you bodily and won't let you go.

There were only six actors, so several of them played multiples roles. Having the same person reappear several times in different guises, having pared-down sets with minimal props, forces the audience to to engage, to construct the dramatic world with the actors.

Meanwhile the hustler, who goes by the name of Omar, uses his clients to construct his own false realities - he tries to be whatever is wanted of him, because what he wants is to be someone else. Or because he finds his own identity as a foreigner, an alien, so slippery and unstable that he has lost track of it. We see him in several situations - in the retail job he has to ensure a regular, base income; a call to a client that develops into something like a relationship; a date with a woman who is not aware that he's a hustler; and a call to an older, male client who has spent some time in the land of Omar's birth. Although these situations are not interrelated in the butterfly-bats-its-wings-in-Malasia way, it is only by seeing the very mutable Omar in all of these situations that the viewer gains a real sense of who he is, what his life is like.

At one point, after a very touching exchange Omar offers to stay the night for no charge; his client says: Sweetheart, we don't pay you to stay, we pay you to leave.

And the last line of the play is: Why would I want to hurt you?

I wonder if the goal of the play was to investigate what it really means to give people what they want, to be what is wanted rather than what you are. Because although it seems like a compulsion for Omar, it's ultimately a self-destructive, very painful one. I also think that the play intentionally draws parallels between hustling and other relationships - retail, love, and family. It's hard to know when Omar is acting to please himself or his client; when he is in his professional or personal mode. And it's easy to see how others need Omar to construct their own fictions - less explicitly, and less consciously, than Omar himself.

I have great friends, and New York has great theatre

Some of Shelley's designs are going to be featured in Country Living Magazine. Congratulations Shelley! I think it will even be the cards that Shelley and Marisa made together, so congratulations to both of my friends. I have always had great faith in Shelley's ability to conquer the world of stationery, but it's nice to see faith give way bit by bit to empirical proof.

Also, I went to see Avenue Q the other day. It's a grown-up, dystopic, kind of rude and obscene spoof on Sesame Street - the characters are muppets grappling with early-adulthood issues of dreams vs. reality, purpose, responsibility. I didn't leave thinking or feeling anything I hadn't thought or felt before, but it's a Broadway musical that really eloquently captures a particular kind of disillusionment. Plus, there are some great songs - like "The Internet is for Porn" or "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" or "Schadenfreude." Any musical with a song called "Schadenfreude" gets a thumbs up from me.

The Magic Flute

Last night I went to see the Met's new production of The Magic Flute. I bought the tickets as a birthday present for Ariana, and a little bit as a birthday present for myself. It was just about the most magnficent staging of an opera I have ever seen - thanks to Julie Taymor.

I have felt for a long time that the strength of live theater is that, compared to cinema, it's impossible to re-create a scene from life. There's no way to make a set, especially one that needs to be changed every fifteen minutes or so, lifelike in every detail. Live productions are forced into abstraction. I've seen a few plays that really take advantage of this, but The Magic Flute is the first opera to do so - where it makes the most sense of all, since opera is prone to be both stylized and larger-than-life.

I spent a few minutes hunting for pictures online, and I didn't find the scenes I was looking for. I wanted to find an image of the Queen of Night, who sings her first aria wearing starry white robes while white flags flutter behind her like wings. Ariana suggested the genius of Taymor's costuming lay in her ability to allow the singers to emote while remaining perfectly still - in this case, the queen was severely immobile and her ghost-wings fluttered and swooped behind her.

I was also looking for a picture of the three spirits and their crane. The spirits were little boys, wearing little diapery underwear and powdered white from head to toe, with a porcupine mass of spiny white hair and long white beards. They had crane familiars, including a huge, ghostly white puppet whose skeletal wings beat slowly as it floated across the stage, fluttering feathers made of thin strips of cloth.

But these are the pictures that I could find, and they are magnificent. The whole performance was magnificent. This is Papageno undergoing his trials:

And this is Papageno dreaming of a Papagena:

This is from Alex Ross's review for the New Yorker:

"“Silent applause” is an apt phrase for what happens when a listener’s inward experience locks in synch with the experience of several thousand others. It’s the sense of a performance “rising and rising,” as Mozart said; of a jaded, lonely crowd made to grin like kids; of a world gone right. I hung on to the feeling as long as I could...

To the usual Masonic symbology she [Taymor] adds motifs from the Kabbalah, Tantric Buddhism, Bunraku, Indonesian puppet theatre, and so on. The Met stage has never been so alive with movement, so charged with color, so brilliant to the eye. The outward effect is of a shimmering cultural kaleidoscope, with all manner of mystical and folk traditions blending together. Behind the surface lies a melancholy sense that history has never permitted such a synthesis—that Mozart’s theme of love and power united is nothing more than a fever dream. But Taymor allows the Enlightenment fantasy to play out to the end...

That these sets could serve as the backdrop for some very scary Vegas magic show—David Copperfield raising the dead, perhaps—is part of the whimsical appeal of the production, which stops well short of taking itself too seriously...

Mark Dendy obtains some of the sharpest dancing I’ve seen on the Met stage; when Papageno immobilizes Monostatos’s would-be tough guys with his magic bells, they become screamingly gay Broadway hoofers...."

That pretty much sums it up. It was a real treat.

Carnegie Hall

Yesterday I went to Carnegie Hall for the first time. I also went to see Denise's boyfriend Alistair perform for the first time. You can see his name on the poster to the right if you squint.

The concert was in Zenkler hall, the newer, underground theater. Apparently it has the best acoustics; you can also hear the subways rumbling by. During the first piece, at least, this was kind of atmospheric because the music was generally unnerving and terrifying. I liked the other two pieces - the ones involving Alistair - better.

The interesting thing about seeing concerts for me is that I go in feeling the way I imagine the average museum-goer feels in a museum - interested, curious, open, but also kind of frustrated and mystified. I know that there's so much more to understand that I don't. But I enjoyed the music and I enjoyed watching the performers.



This one is (almost) a close up of Alistair, in the blue collared shirt, second from the right:


I liked that Alistair had a very focused, controlled, kind of still way of playing. Some of the other cellists were squirming and flopping like a baby on a changing table.

I got to meet some of Denise's friends - not surprisingly, they are lovely and vivacious and smart - and afterwards, I tagged along to the afterparty with the other cellists. First of all, this involved a very brief and frankly kind of uneventful but nonetheless thrilling jaunt backstage. Backstage! At Carnegie Hall! All I really saw was a tray of cookies that didn't look very edible, and the cellists that still looked pretty much exactly the way they did onstage. We went to a restaurant around the corner, and I had yet another insufficiently peaty scotch (why is it so hard to find scotch that tastes like dirt? doesn't everybody want their scotch to taste like dirt?) and everybody else mostly drank beer. The other musicians were also pretty interesting people, full of good stories.

I was especially excited about the concert because yesterday was Ariana's book-launch party (unfortunately, yet typically, I missed the reading because I went to the wrong location, realized my mistake, recouped, and then went to the right location and got there too late). So that makes two days in a row when I see friends of mine in the midst of major accomplishments, and it really makes me feel excited and happy and proud and lucky to know them.

back from the dead

I got back from California a few days ago. I was glad to see my family, I always am, but it was a stressful weekend. Mostly because my grandmother has been very ill; I was in the hospital visiting with her for most of Sunday.

On the other hand, I did go to Disneyland with my cousin Galen and his fiancee Lindsay. It's the most time I've spent with Galen in a while, and the most time I've spent with Lindsay ever. It was good company, so the tromping around and the waiting didn't bother me - that's the secret to a good day at Disneyland, good company (or to any other day, really). This is Galen and Lindsay on Splash Mountain:


We got stuck on Pirates of the Caribbean for about twenty minutes, in the room with the big fire where all the pirates are singing Yo-Ho-Yo-Ho, A Pirates Life For Me. I think it drove Galen and Lindsay a little crazy but I was in heaven. I couldn't have planned it better if I'd tried. We were right in front of my favorite robot, which is the drunk pirate sitting on the bridge with a very dirty foot.

They've changed the ride around a bit to fit the plot of the movie, and there are Johnny Depp robots hiding in nooks and crannies. I don't mind the changes (I think seeing the different formats intertwine is pretty interesting) but it really screws with the overall narrative of the ride. It used to be a heavy-handed, greed-will-lead-to-death-and-destruction message; now, all of a sudden, all the other pirates die in a haze of booze and chaos while Johnny Depp gets away with the treasure.

(only, if you connect the final tableau of Johnny Depp alone in a room full of gold, there's a direct parallel to the first scenes in the ride, where lonely skeletons clutch at their treasure, suggesting to the viewer that they have achieved an empty victory indeed...)

Anyhow. I also went to Fashion Island with my parents:


(my mother's expression here is absolutely perfect - she makes this face at least ten times a day, or some multiple thereof)

and the beach:

I'm putting in lots of pictures, I think, because I've been inspired the pictures of China over at Miscellany Inc.. They're really extraordinary, and now I'm carrying around my camera for the first time in...ages. I still don't use my digital camera that well, I think I just need practice.

Moving along, there's also the plane ride back to New York:


And a few days ago Melinda and I spent the day together. We went out for brunch at the NoHo Star; I had a butternut squash ravioli that was really good - the sauce was very thin, very buttery, and very lemony. The rich-tart flavor was the perfect counterpoint to the very squashy ravioli, and I have to say it's probably the best execution I've ever tasted of a dish that I order semi-regularly.

Melinda at the NoHo Star:


We went to the Natural History Museum. I wanted to look at the hall of human evolution but it was closed, so we lingered a bit in the hall of south american peoples instead. Pretty spicy, I tell you. But I don't have any pictures. I do, however, have a picture of the seats of the movie theater from when we wandered over to Lincoln Center to see For Your Consideration, which is a nice, kooky dark comedy making fun of Hollywood with a ton of great character actors. To wit:


We got there kind of early and I had time to spare.

OK, that's all for now. Coming up next...book reviews of Ernest Hemingway, David Sedaris, and Michael Chabon.

P.S.: there is a comments feature, hint hint.