thinking about...aftermath & irene

Hurricane Irene turned out to be more of a monsoon-ish rainstorm in my neck of Manhattan; the morning after we went out to survey the damage and found that it was minor, but a threatening sky still hung over the high-rises, every so often wind whipped the streets, and with the subways down and nowhere to go, the city had an unusually somber, quiet mood.

As I walked through my neighborhood and discovered the spontaneous ponds, re-arranged park paths, and newly-formed archways formed by bowed branches, I was surprised by the little ways that the storm had transformed the landscape of the city, and let me see it in ways that I hadn't before, or at least, with an attention to detail that I hadn't used for a long time. The colors of the drenched buildings on my street seemed more vibrant, and verdigris and moss took on an unusual intensity.

All over the ground were unexpected little still lifes: trapped duckweed, the texture of washed-out wood chips, clumps of leaves, acorns and seed balls that had been knocked down, flowering vine that had been tattered in the wind, a lichen-covered tree limb.

I liked the way that paved pathways were washed out to look more like something you'd see in in actual woods, and the brimming streams and waterfalls seemed to fill out Central Park and show off its beauty full-tilt. Perhaps my favorite, though, was this enormous old tree that had been uprooted. Seeing a giant from this angle kind of throws off your equilibrium. I was fascinated by the cool/gross texture of the roots and earth, and the bizarre silhouette that it cut. It was like the storm had unearthed a little piece of another world.

My two cents on "The Book of Mormon: The Musical" in the Tribune

"Despite the sweep of last month’s Tony Awards, I have noticed that many fellow Mormons, including a few of my open-minded New York City neighbors, have said they do not intend to see “The Book of Mormon: The Musical”...I think it would be a mistake for church members to reject the musical en masse; doing so would cut us out of an important part of the national conversation about our faith...." Read the whole article here:

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/52272104-82/church-musical-university-mormon.html.csp

Pioneer Day, Y'all

I love this version of this classic song by my friend Mark Abernathy, and the Sabre Rattlers. It makes me a little homesick, which is funny, because I haven't called Utah home for years and years.

thesis week intensity

If I haven't returned your phone calls, texts, smoke signals...it is because my thesis is due one week from today. Unfortunately, imminent doom is my only real motivator, but it is quite effective.

For motivation, my dissertating friend and I have been coming up with motivational themes every week. A couple weeks ago it was "Keep up the intensity," to remind myself that I have to stay on top of it, and can't just lapse into five-hour sessions of watching 30 Rock and eating Hot Tamales--just to give you one example of a completely hypothetical distraction.

Last week I upgraded to Shark Week intensity--because what is more intense than a whole week of sharks???

If you have any ideas for me for even intenser themes--I can use all the help I can get. There are a zillion distractions and at least two hopelessly crappy chapters between here and next Monday.

and uzi!

I went to DC to meet this little one last weekend, and he stood me up. He decided to come five days late. I have to say, from the looks of it, he is worth the wait.

The advent of Ali and Curt's baby, or "Uzi" as he has been nicknamed, means the family offspring has tripled in the last week and a half. I think I am won over by the power of babies. I had almost forgotten how a newborn makes the whole family unabashedly sentimental, and in the best way, a little bit giddy.

welcome elle marie

A niece! Little does she know what an extaordinarily long line of women, and more women, she has fallen into. We are so happy to have her--the long-awaited next installment.

I wish I could be with her and see her almond eyes and touch her little seashell ears. If I could, maybe I would read her this poem:


Mrs. Adam
by Kathleen Norris

I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve,
alias Mrs. Adam. You know, there is no account
of her death in the Bible, and why am I not Eve?
Emily Dickinson in a letter,
12 January, 1846


Wake up,
you’ll need your wits about you.
This is not a dream,
but a woman who loves you, speaking.


She was there
when you cried out;
she brushed the terror away.
She knew
when it was time to sin.
You were wise
to let her handle it,
and leave that place.


We couldn’t speak at first
for the bitter knowledge,
the sweet taste of memory
on our tongues.


Listen, it’s time.
You were chosen too,
to put the world together.

harvest display

When I got this month's New Yorker from my mailbox yesterday, I was startled and happy to see Wayne Thiebaud on the cover. The tell-tale signs were all there: the food, the little halos around the food, the sometimes garish colors.

I have been thinking about food the last few weeks, we are talking about food in class, ala my on-going preoccupation with Michael Pollan. This particular Thiebaud echoes something I think about when I go to the grocery store, especially here in New York. At my neighborhood market right now, there are pumpkins and bubbly squash spilling onto the sidewalks, autumn apples in ten varieties, and, oddly, an overabundance of raspberries...? which are on special.

The "Harvest Display" in our modern world is a funny thing--not just displaying our harvest, but everyone else's, including South America's, which is where the November bumper crop of raspberries comes from. Next to Theibaud's pumpkin lies a summer treat--watermelon--and below are boxes of goods from Chile, Australia, Mexico. On the bottom shelves is that ubiquitous fruit that still seems a little out of place in New York in the winter--bananas.

All of this aside, though, the thing I liked best about Thiebaud's cover was the idea that he might have just painted it, that it might be new. If I feel uninspired or tired, I picture old Thiebaud next to his easel, stooped and squinting, still delighted by the world and churning out work.

election night

About 11:15 p.m. last night, New York went nuts. People started yelling and cheering in the streets, and more people answered the cheers and went out and joined them, and cheered some more.

On the sidewalks strangers were high-fiving. Every few minutes someone would shout, "Obama!" and a collective roar would go up. Then someone on the next corner would do the same thing, and someone on the next corner.

A friend called from Harlem, her voice breathless and muffled by the cheering and pot-banging up there. The streets were so full that cars had stopped using them. "I just can't stop crying," she said. (Hopefully she will blog about it :) )

Cabbies, yes, even cabbies joined in on the fray, beep-beeping their approval as they drove by, as jubilant riders hung out the windows, shouting.

I got on a subway car just as a chant of "O-ba-ma" went up on the platform. Could it be? Even the subway train seemed to pause on the tracks for a moment as a parade of supporters brandishing signs came down the platform. Everyone on the platform started chanting, and everyone on the train started chanting back. Then we started clapping, looking out and knocking on the train windows, until the chant reached a fever pitch.

With the market in a bind and Wall Street a mess, it's good to see the city with a smile on its face again. The whole place seems a little hopeful.

Coming home from Washington Heights tonight, I took an elevator down to the subway. I make the elevator ride several times a week, and it's terrible--cramped, stuffy, suffocating. It's one of the worst parts of my day, and, seemingly, everyone else's, including the elevator operator. She's a silent and unsmiling woman with corn rows, who sits behind a little desk in the elevator with a tiny fan blowing on her. She has a miserable job. Today as I was getting off, she broke her code of silence. She turned to me, one thumb turned up, and said, "Obama!"

I turned up both thumbs and said, "Obama!" back. I smiled the whole ride home.

spotted

If, like me, you became enamoured with Nanette Lepore's home in Elle Decor recently, you might be as delighted as I was when I saw this:



I gasped when I walked past Z. Gallerie the other day and saw this in their window. I'm as tired of the pirate trend as the next person, but I like that this is presented in Lepore's home as part of a salty-dog nautical theme paired with velvet, antlers, and mid-century furniture to make a humorous-but-tasteful admixture. Now all I need is $800, a super-size oil portrait of Eva Peron, and Jonathan Adler to pull off the whole look.

familiar face

I opened my J.Crew catalogue and was loving their new fall line. Not suprisingly, I was particularly drawn to a pretty yellow coat. And then I realized, wait a minute, the gamine beauty wearing the coat was one of my students! Last year I had count 'em, not one, but two models in the same classroom. And they were both nice, and smart, and yes, very pretty.

Hating on beautiful people just isn't what is used to be. sigh.

still hope

Even if you procrastinated and didn't register--there is still hope for you, would-be voter. If you have ever voted you can call the district in which you were last registered and request a vote-by-mail ballot.

Just google the name of the state where you last voted and "absentee ballot." You should be able to get the phone number for your county registrar where they can confirm your voter registration and mail you a ballot asap. Even this loophole expires 7 days before the general election, so no matter who you're voting for, get on it.

It's probably the most important election of our lifetime, yo.


*Thanks to Em and Shephard Fairey for the image

mais oui

This little wall sculpture from stepanka on Etsy got me thinking about yes again. I read somewhere that the first time John Lennon met Yoko Ono he went to a gallery to see her art installations. In one of the pieces he had to go up a long ladder, open a little box, open another little box, and so forth, and when he opened the last box inside was a little message that said, "yes." Which is actually a great metaphor for falling in love. What is falling in love, if not finding the one person who say yes to you--both figuratively and literally?

I also read that at the Prada Soho store architect Rem Koolhaas designed the cash registers, and the buy/enter button has YES spelled out on it using the yen, euro and dollar symbols. And what is shopping, really, if not saying yes to yourself?

And finally, Ugo Rondinone's facade at the New Museum in New York:




*Read somewhere=information that has accumulated in my brain and undergone processes of forgetfulness, wishful thinking, and pattern-seeking and may or may not resemble fact.

tribec-hood images

Due to housing adventures, B and I spent a month in Tribeca. This was my favorite piece of graffiti in the neighborhood, which I walked past everyday on the way in and out of the sublet. I think the palm trees are my favorite part--although the mispelling of the Brit rocker's name is pretty awesome.

Tribeca is a low-rise neighborhood so there is lots of good light, and it is weirdly quiet and un-crowded--so a good place to try out my new camera. The shots that aren't too out of focus are probably thanks to my camera-savvy sis, who came along and snapped some shots one evening.

Sometimes I would wake up in the morning to find new tags around the block--so I got to feel like the taggers were like secret friends who would leave me messages to find.



I like the old and new in this one--this is the first highrise going up in north Tribeca. That crane fell down earlier this year.

red door

hole to the sky in an awning

old chairs

old door



i like the crosses in the window

my cat Scratch got out of my apartment on Duane St. on Monday night, and was last seen headed up Staple St. If you know where he is please contact me ANY TIME

happy, love-filled blur

Today Britton and I celebrate our first anniversary, and I finally got most of the photos uploaded to flickr.

After the wedding, I told B that now I know why people get wedding photographers--so they can see what happened at their own wedding!

The whole thing was a blur, but it was a blur of goodness and happiness and faces and voices of people who we love best.

There were so many personal touches from people we love, too--Shanna's wreath on the garden door, Dan and Marta's Martha-perfect signs, Robby's website, Emily's hand-bound guest book, my mom's homemade mint brownies and lemon cookies, Jamie's groom cake, my dad's ingenious floating lights system, dozens of lanterns hung by family, last-minute touches of ribbon or a vintage cake plate from the Valentiners...not to mention wonderful pre-show showers and parties thrown by family and friends. We also had childhood friends and high school friends and city friends and hometown friends who came from all over. Thank you thank you to everyone who added their touch or came from near and far to be with us.

Getting to be with the one person you love best, surrounded by people who love you best, is pretty much as good as it gets.

resolved on hbo

My friend Greg's latest film, "Resolved," makes its television debut on HBO tonight at 9/8c. To check local listings you can go to http://www.hbo.com/ SEARCH: Resolved.

I already wrote one long post about how fascinating and well-crafted this film is (audience favorite at the L.A. film festival!). This film goes beyond its quirky characters--smart and lovable high school debaters--to take on issues of race and rhetoric. I highly recommend watching it if you get a chance. Also, the art direction is crazy awesome.

on the road

I am taking a luxurious summer jaunt for the next five to six weeks, hitting all the hotspots: Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas. I like to consider myself bi-coastal, if you consider the Missouri River one of the coasts. Hamptons are so last year, Wichita is where it is going off this summer.

I am spending a lot of time familiarizing myself with other technologies such as GPS, iTrip, Bible belt radio, car jacks, emergency flares and transponders--so I will be spending some time away from the world of cyber fun. Until I return, I am riding off into the sunset. Wish me luck.

metropolis meets wilderness

I saw a New Yorker cover once that was a New Yorker's view of the United States. Manhattan takes up most of the picture, New Jersey gets a shout-out, but after that the rest of the country is squished into a couple of inches with a only a few random states and cities named before Hollywood, and then the Pacific Ocean.

When you live in the West--especially inland West--it's easy to have an inferiority complex. You have the sense that everything cool comes to you last--like indie films, or clothing chains, or the Hard Rock Cafe, which came to my hometown of Salt Lake City about 10 years after the restaurant was already lame. Of course, California is the counterweight to the country's east-centricness, but it still feels like New Yorkers think of California as a quaint place where people make tacky entertainment and wear flip flops and shorts to the office. For these reasons, I love to see West Coast novelties that have travelled against the current and invaded the East Coast instead of the other way around.

For example, Jamba Juice opened in Manhattan a couple summers ago, and New Yorkers were lining up down the street for Mango-a-go-gos and Pina Cowladas. Having lived in Utah and California, I was baffled and somewhat smug, knowing that smoothies were a long-since passe food trend out west. I mean seriously, wasn't Jamba Juice even before Cold Stone? And even Cold Stone was old news. Likewise with Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. For about six months after its opening, it seemed like all anyone on Manhattan wanted to do was go to Whole Foods. I actually had invitations to go "out to dinner" at Whole Foods. For once, I, the Westerner, got to yawn and say, "Oh yes, Whole Foods, it's cute. Be sure to try the organic gingersnaps, everyone loves them." Hey, I have to take my opportunities for snobbery where I can get 'em.

Anyway, what I'm leading up to is that I went to lunch yesterday at this trendy place called Bubby's, in Tribeca, and one of the menu items about blew my boots off. Right there, under hamburgers, was "The Garlic Burger: our version of the Cotton Bottom's classic." Okay, so if you are from Salt Lake City, particularly the 84121 zipcode, you have known the Cotton Bottom practically since you were old enough to look out the car window. It's a dive bar off the freeway interchange, sandwiched between a fancy restaurant with valets, etc. and a bunch of tree-lined estate homes. Nestled in the fanciness is the Cotton Bottom--like a weed in the rose garden. The entire lot around it seems to have gone to seed, and there are always Harley Davidsons parked out front. Of course, if you were a kid you just knew the Cotton Bottom was the nexus of everything bad and fun that your mom didn't want you to do.

I finally went to the Cotton Bottom a couple years ago when I was home for my sister Jamie's bridesmaid party. I had their famous garlic burger, so I was quite confident of what the Bubby's waitress confirmed: the chef had lived in Utah or skied in Utah or something, and this $15 burger was in fact modeled after that of my hometown dive bar. Little did I expect that this, of all obscure and random things would make it to the big city. Take heart, Westerners. If the Cotton Bottom can make it in this town, anything is possible.

p.s. HogiYogi: if you've been thinking about expanding to Manhattan, now is your chance!!!

bored of my brain

Sometimes I get bored of my brain. Not bored out of my brain--although sometimes that happens, too--but, I mean I get bored of being in my head with my same old ideas, worldviews, thought patterns, etc. One of the things I like best about teaching is I get to see the workings of other brains, on paper, a couple times a week.

My best students are often not humanities or English majors, like you might expect, but science students. There are a bunch of engineering kids who have to take my writing class and they inevitably think they will hate it, and wonder why the eff do they have to take it when all they're going to do with their lives is design geodesic domes and map the human genome--or whatever it is they learn to do in those science classes.

Anyway, the science kids think differently, and I love their approach to problem-solving and structure and ways to use words and, well, I love to see the way their little brains work. On the last day of class one of these engineering students, who we will call Chen, brought in this sort-of prose poem, an ode to U Writing, made up of his Facebook statuses over the course of the semester.

U Writing Related/Inspired Facebook Statuses:

Chen-Chen's way to type 300 words: write 3,000, then cut out 2,700 words.

Chen-writing when God sleeps. 7 am.

Chen-ambition will kill me soon.

Chen-it did.

Chen-wow, I'm done with U Writing for 2 minutes?

Chen-thoughts of UW creep in...creep Chen out...creep out.

Chen-life has a lot of doing that does nothing...wrote two pages i had to completely delete...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Chen-verisimilitude of being.

Chen-the king of thwarted time.

Chen-is shocked at minimalism...aka, shocked at myself.

Chen-high from insanity.

Chen-I BLEED SLEEP

Chen-I DON'T BLEED BLOOD, I BLEED CAFFEINE

Chen-lost in the maelstroms of the mind.

Chen-genius lacks cultural precedence.

Chen-thinking deep thoughts with a shallow mind.

Chen-400 standard deviations below myself.

Chen-has IQ(-1) after -100 hours of sleep.

Chen-ode to the essay: Oh cursed be the spite-that I was ever born to set you right.

Chen-senseless all-nighter number infinity.

Chen-sleeplessly.

Chen-uni writing existentialism.


I probably wouldn't have liked this list so much except I knew how much he started to like writing, and the amazing, sometimes oddball connections he could make in his essays. In one piece he successfully linked the wilderness vs. civilization debate to the black widow living behind his bookshelf to Huck Finn to the Ford on cinderblocks on his neighbor's lawn.

I also like this little list because it's emblematic of his unusual way of doing things, but at the same time reveals the same frustrations that I, myself, often have with writing. These could have been my writing Facebook statuses. In class we often talk about what makes writing so hard is that it's a massive act of translation--an attempt to encapsulate the context, logic, memory, etc. in your own brain in a way that makes sense to another brain.

This prose poem reminded me of what's so great about writing in general: it provides us with the comfort of knowing that we don't all think alike, and at the same time, it provides us with the comfort of knowing that our experience is not vastly different.

alone in xanadu

I am homesick this week. This is the time of year when school is out, and I usually flee back to the West, back home, back to family, just in time for the yellow wildflowers to bloom on the mountainside, just in time for backyard barbecues, just in time to drive around town in my mother's convertible, just in time to stay up all night laughing, eating too much junk food and watching worthless television.

But here I am, still in the city. And to make matters worse, everyone else in my family is home, barbecuing and convertibling and eating too much cake without me. It's times like this I most keenly feel how far I've strayed from home, how I chose somehow to live in a city that has no kin or bloodtie for me. I feel maybe a bit like Joan Didion did when she wrote this perfect essay about being a young woman of the West who found herself living in New York City:

From Goodbye to All That

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.

Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

The first time I read this essay, this last part struck me as particularly true. I don't know that my friends who grew up here can ever quite have the same moment, on the way home from shopping for socks or getting a haircut, when they look up and catch a glimpse of Times Square or the Chrysler Building, and think, My goodness! I live here. I live right here in the Center of It All. I am trying to enjoy these charms of the city to cheer myself.

dirty thirty

My friend is coming up to the city tomorrow for her birthday. What would you do if you were coming to New York City for your 30th?

ps. She's been to New York several times before.

photo courtesy of someone named Pancake's myspace page