06.17.08: culture blotter {hamlet @ shakespeare in the park}



[upper west side, via cell phone]
1: just find a bar to take cover in and i'll meet you there!
2: no, YOU find a bar, i'm going to get our tickets!
1: you're fucking crazy!
2: I LOVE SHAKESPEARE!

one of the nicest things about having a website is my apparent ability to make things happen by bitching when they don't (see: getting love from mcsweeney's, winning money with a scratch-off lottery ticket, winning a trip to iceland*). i learned last week of the virtual line for shakespeare in the park (that is, you can sign up for a lottery between midnight and noon and then check back in the afternoon to see if you've gotten tickets; in previous years, you had to actually languish on the street all morning). that was the good news; the bad news was that hamlet is only running through the end of the month, and we're going to be in california for a week as of this saturday, and the number of tickets distributed through the virtual line is comparatively teensy.

it worked, though, and i was all set for my dub-shakes fix when the apocalypse kicked up at quarter to seven. i can't say for sure that little dogs on leashes were taking to the air like box kites as i scurried past the museum of natural history, but i can't say for sure that they didn't. joe said a huge tree branch came crashing down at his feet when he was en route to the box office, which is why he was yelling so loudly on the phone. i probably should have hidden somewhere, but the storm really was more excellent than scary. also, i really do love shakespeare, damn it. how often is it situationally appropriate to yell that into a cell on a street corner in the middle of a hellacious thunderstorm? we both made it to the delacorte, where it poured for about half an hour, but the theater staff assured us that the show would go on if the weather let up at all; a few nights ago, they'd played through the rain and just pushed water off of the stage between scenes(!). we bought cheap hamlet garbage bag ponchos** in case it got bad again and settled in.

the show itself was marvelous in spots and disappointing in others. sam waterston (who played the last hamlet in the park in 1975) gave polonius a single, devastating moment of dementia (in act 2, he falls silent for about twenty seconds while instructing reynaldo) that was one of the show's emotional peaks; i think that vulnerability made his death much more tragic than it usually feels. i left the theater convinced that my favorite lines in act 5, scene 2 had been mangled - i could have sworn that "there's a divinity that shapes our ends" and "the readiness is all" were part of the same speech - but apparently i give my memory more credit than it's due (see: manhattan locations of wendy's, previous post). i could also swear that the play most certainly should not end with horatio taking a bullet in the head, execution style, but i am historically resistant to hypermilitary versions of the tragedies ('99 royal shakespeare company othello, i'm looking at you). michael stuhlbarg is a fine hamlet, especially in the first few soliloquies; his soft, breathy delivery is much more interesting than that of super-manly hamlets i've seen, and it pairs nicely with the hysteria of his manic scenes later on (he reminded me of jonny lee miller as sick boy in trainspotting). lauren ambrose was meh as ophelia (she didn't have much chemistry with stuhlbarg, so her insanity wasn't very tragic), and i really don't care to see anyone other than derek jacobi as claudius, but still: i love shakespeare.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 have you ever powered through a foul-weather show? was it worth it?

02 if you could cast one of the tragedies however you liked, who would you conscript? i'm going to have to think about that one for a while, but i'm pretty sure robert loggia would be old hamlet.

03 is it ethical to make a delivery guy bring you takeout in central park in the middle of a storm? (note: i did not do this.)

*trying this one next: what the hell, iceland? where's my trip?

**still in their packages since the rain never really picked back up, but i can't wait to have an excuse to wear one: they're covered with the show's skull logo. hamlet ponchos!

06.15.08

06.13.08

one of my favorite things about living in san francisco was our near-constant access to great shows. it was occasionally tricky to get tickets to see, say, belle and sebastian at the warfield,* but seeing le tigre at the great american music hall or tanya donelly at bimbo's was like rolling out of bed. with bimbo's shows, that was almost literal: we usually walked there and walked home. hooking it up in new york, on the other hand, you have to be prepared to cut someone. people will queue for an hour for free frozen yogurt in this town; imagine what they'll do to see vampire weekend at a small venue. i usually can't be bothered with jostling for tickets, but i have felt feisty this spring: we have four shows coming up! behold!

22 september: my bloody valentine at roseland ballroom. long ago when the earth was flat and the british pound was worth less than $20, we got tickets to see MBV in glasgow on july 2nd. joe is one of those guys who feels that loveless is one of the greatest albums of all time, and i can be a competitive little brat: i figured we'd be able to win any music geek throwdown with that show under our belts. oh, and glasgow is one of the finest cities on earth (high point of our honeymoon, hands down). then we found that airfare was going to be a thousand dollars apiece; then the roseland shows were announced and i got tickets for those. internets, do you know anyone who'd like to see a free show in scotland? seriously, the ticket agent is making it really difficult for me to resell. i'd rather just give the gift of shoegazer: drop me a line.

1 october: echo & the bunnymen at radio city. o maladjusted '80s marvelousness! i've loved these guys since i first heard "bring on the dancing horses" on a taped-from-TV** copy of pretty in pink. they're performing ocean rain with a full orchestra, and i don't care that ian mcculloch has started sounding like neil young instead of post-punk misanthropy incarnate. "the killing moon" live! with an orchestra! i miss wearing velvet all the time.

3 october: hot chip at terminal 5. "over and over" showed up on new york noise a few years ago and has been stuck in my head more or less ever since. i was disconcerted at first, but it's a marvelous song (and video), so i've adapted. i imagine there will be a lot of fancy, fancy hipsters at the hot chip show; OK with me, as long as they bathe.

29 november: jim gaffigan at town hall. crowded house came through town recently, and joe (who feels more strongly about neil finn than anyone i've ever met) decided we didn't need to get tickets because they were something like $50 apiece; now we're spending only a bit less than that to hear a man talk about hot pockets. i blame george, who mentioned gaffigan's sexy tour when we were heat-dazed en route to new jersey last saturday and had the collective IQ of a raisin. it'll be fun, i'm sure, but i...yeah. hot pockets.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 is free frozen yogurt better than vampire weekend?

02 what's the greatest album of all time?

03 did i go to wendy's twice yesterday?

*jacob and i met a girl at that show who later appeared in a dvd extra for season 3 of the L word.

**i think it was the first dubbed movie i ever saw; i didn't realize for years that jon cryer wasn't actually calling james spader slime.

06.09.08

joe was being a hero and installing our front-room air conditioner (just in time, sweet christ) as MSNBC was chronicling hillary clinton's epic tardiness on saturday, so i was alone in enjoying the paris-hilton-goes-to-jail coverage of a motionless SUV in her driveway. i kind of wish i'd been alone to watch the whole speech, since i lost it about two minutes in; i think i managed to say "oh, look at her" before my voice broke, and i was useless thereafter. her voice was tight and flat, up in the back of her throat, and as tyra banks would note, she had dead eyes; for the first few minutes i felt little more than sympathy. the "more" was a bit of self-pity, i think: i didn't vote for hillary, but it was satisfying to have a woman in this race (even one who behaved as badly as she ultimately did), and i don't think i realized that until she stepped out of it.

content-wise, i think the speech was fair to middling: her initial comments about obama (and the weird tone of her refrain) would have been more effective minus the body language, but the woman's had a rough year: it's hard to fault her for looking deflated. saying "yes we can" was going the extra mile for the shit sandwich, if you will, and settles her account after last tuesday. as for the many comments about the women's movement, given the foul-weather solidarity i was chewing on, i had no problem with them (except for the bit about shooting fifty of us into space, which...well, i'll pass). at the end of the day, hillary's Old Bitters will need more coaxing to get behind obama, but i think she initiated the next phase of this election with grace. i hope people get tired of hating her.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 was HRC's speech really moving and brilliant, or is the press just feeling extra-friendly because she finally did the right thing?

02 do we have to lump the hillary nutcrackers in with misogyny that won't be missed? i'll be honest: i thought those were pretty cool.

03 would hillary have been able to beat kerry? or, to flip on the clinton axis: would bill have been able to beat obama?

06.06.08

so the other big news in these parts (after, you know, the eating of breakfast) is the constant expiration of little creatures. ever heard the drowning pool song "bodies (let the bodies hit the floor)" (featured prominently in previews for stop-loss, that ryan phillippe iraq movie)? joe has a friend who was having sex when his CD changer switched from booty music over to that track; it's possibly the best never-to-be-heard-in-the-sack song ever,* and we dissolve into giggles whenever we hear it. anyway, it's become the little three-legged cat's song, as he's destroyed at least five mice in the last two weeks. i should never have joked about my domesticated cats' crappy hunting abilities re: the mouse they groomed to death a few months ago: i had to pry a live and tragically suffering one** from jude's jaws two weeks ago. another, fatally head-chomped, used its final moments to crawl near the base of a heavy swivel chair (and get swept beneath it in our initial corpse search), and we spent a week and a half gagging and buying up every nastily-scented odor-killer duane reade would sell us (we thought the body was unreachable under the floorboards). the one we found yesterday morning? internets, don't let your cats watch the end of braveheart.

the mice are coming from a hole in the floor under the radiator. our super knows this and claims he will come by to plug the hole. the three-legged cat knows this and has stopped sleeping on my pillow so that he can guard The Mouse Chute; he parks three feet in front of it and sniffs creepily, like a ringwraith. as i will not use poison, traps, or those horrible glue panels while the hole is open, this is his time to shine; given how many cat activities he's automatically denied, being tailless and three-legged, maybe i should be glad he's found a hobby. no, i'm ready for mausfest to be over.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 other contenders for Worst Sack Song?

02 speaking of heavy metal, have you yet had the pleasure of reading enter sandman: the children's book?

03 do you think one of those sonic gopherbusters would keep mice from leaping into my gimpy cat's mouth?

04 why do air fresheners, scented candles, and "odor neutralizers" smell so terrible?

*though i concede, as others have noted, that fogerty's "centerfield" is strong competition.

**i am so, so glad the poor thing died on the fire escape a minute after i placed it there to stall for time. i am in no way equipped to mercy-kill; when i was a kid and my pet mouse was dying of cancer, i made my mother take her to the vet to be euthanized.

06.05.08

i never bought the idea of breakfast as the most important meal of the day. i figured it was propaganda from The Breakfast Industry, like how dairy farmers tell me every year or two that that consuming too much soy will make my toes fall off. why would i waste valuable shoe-choosing time on food when i've always been able to just have a cup of coffee and go? the women in my family who aren't bakers are endurance artists: we like to see how long we can go without eating, peeing, seeing the sex and the city movie* (hell will freeze over first), and so on.

new shit started coming to light this winter, when i developed a soft spot for the corporate cafeteria, of all things. it's good-looking to begin with; when storms make fun blue shapes on the glass roof and the giant space shrinks to pools of light around the early-morning fruit and frittata stations, it becomes a little fairyland (ladymag employees - and ladmag employees, for that matter - sort of look like forest sprites anyway, so there you go). i'd stop there for grapefruit juice just to have an excuse to check out the snow-ceiling; eventually i started getting juice every day, and last month i gave the scrambled eggs a try. presto, breakfast-craving freakishness! within a day or two, my body started expecting food in the morning. my little box of breakfast would make my stomach growl audibly on the elevator ride up to my floor, which must have endeared me to the forest sprites. i assumed that would be the beginning of the massive flab gain i expected after quitting smoking, but that's the kicker: i started losing weight, more quickly than i was while simply working out. so all that stuff about waking up one's metabolism is...true?

so my message for you, internets, is that breakfast is a good thing, which you already knew. in fact, i blame you for failing to convince me sooner. also, after eating scrambled eggs for like a month, i've hit a wall: any ideas? also also, brunch is still for suckers.

*can i weigh in on stuff like anthony lane's review and its infamous david hughes illustration** if i don't? let's chance it: both made me cackle, even though the former speaks fondly of audrey hepburn and the latter reminds me of chuck klosterman (he's illustrated CK's stuff in esquire).

** much has been made of how he uglies up gals (misogyny, misogyny!), but if anyone's to blame, it's the art director who gave him the assignment; hughes is gloriously grotesque as a rule.

05.27.08

thanks to slow workplaces before the long weekend, joe and i made it to the ziegfeld on friday for an early indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull fix and were on our way home by a quarter after six. he asked me what i thought and i complained that i always have to go first: what did he think?

he thought it was EXECRABLE. that's a tough descriptor to sell in casual conversation unless you're gore vidal, but joe pulled it off: he oozed so much contempt for that movie that a word coined after 1800 just wouldn't do. he (like a lot of reviewers) loved the first fifteen minutes or so, but he hated shia labeouf. and the CGI. and the silly close encounters sequence at the end.* it was so execrable he was almost angry.

i'm...not, even though i don't really disagree. were i a monkey in the 1950's, there's no way i'd fight with shia labeouf the greaser, even against communists, even if i had been computer-generated by spielberg's personal monkeys. i hate almost all alien storylines, which is why i find the x files both wonderful and terrible (i love monsters-of-the-week and david duchovny and can take or leave the show's a-plot). thing is, indiana jones isn't meant for me. there was a young kid sitting behind us in the theater who kept piping up to his dad (and pissing me off): "why are they chasing him? what do you think's in that box? look at that!" i was going to be the mean old lady who shushed him, but i probably whispered the same things when i was ten, seeing the last crusade with my mom. i adored that movie, but i'm not sure it was umpteen times better than this one was: as many have noted, spielberg makes films for kids. i think raiders of the lost ark holds up over time, sort of, but have you seen temple of doom, complete with kate capshaw shrieking like betty boop every ten seconds, in the last decade or so? harrison ford has never really been able to act, and there have always been weird critter sequences and ridiculous side-by-side set pieces (the patch of street outside our apartment is rougher than both the jungle paths in crystal skull and the mine car tracks in raiders of the lost ark). sometimes the ridiculousness works: i giggled with delight at the motorcycle chase across the college campus early in the movie, which was up there with the hiding-in-a-basket scooby doo silliness i remember from raiders. sometimes, as when cate blanchett was squishing giant ants between her sexy stalinist kneecaps, it's just ridiculous. the formulas have always been there, though, and calling spielberg out for them now is rather beside the point.

long story short, this was easily the worst of the indiana jones movies - but if you're shorter than this sign, you will think it's boss, and that's fine with me; at least we were spared kate capshaw. what did you think, o internets? give me your best gore vidal.

*per joe, the alien stuff might have worked if it had been revealed that indy himself was extraterrestrial; it would explain why harrison ford was able to avoid getting nailed by fourteen thousand soviet machine guns at once.

05.21.08

this weekend's craft prototype for the cold war kitchen, or eatin' on a jet plane:



i lost my shit when i saw last wednesday's design*sponge DIY project: thrifting! ceramic art inspired by sarah cihat! displaying of cupcakes! i've been fixated on retro cake stands for the last month or two, even though i've made a grand total of three successful desserts in my life (as baby jo noted yesterday, only half of the women in our family are bakers; i actually took a french pastry class in college, and it was far more grueling than first-year russian, if tastier): my interest in dishes makes up for my lack of interest in most sweets, or so i like to think.

enter the recycled cake stand project, and the small forest of mismatched candlesticks and plates now cluttering up our pass-through. in this first attempt, i learned that contact paper (cut in the shape of a jet to let the pattern on the little german saucer show through) does NOT create much of a seal with porcelain, especially when you ask it to bend; when i work up to more complicated shapes (the blue plate in the background will feature either an octopus or an anglerfish), i'm going to have to be much more careful about placement. i also learned that i am no banksy: spray paint is a bitch (i still have to redo the back lip of the saucer and a few weird spots on the underside). then there is the issue of food safety, and how i'll have to switch to much more expensive (and more difficult to apply) ceramic paint if i wish to use these to serve non-wrappered food. all that said...i think it'll work next to the bill-clinton-and-his-mistresses nesting dolls above our stove. any thoughts on future shape/color/design combos?

05.15.08

101 in 1001: 040 have my palm read in a psychic's parlor [completed 05.15.08]



i've had the friendly neighborhood psychic (not this one) tucked away in the back of my mind ever since i discovered her on my birthday last year; really, what could be more painless than ducking out to see her on my lunch break? today was my very last chance to do so (list ends tomorrow!), so i headed over at about noon - and immediately chickened out. what if someone from the ladymag saw me going in? a psychic's parlor isn't as bad as a sex shop or, i don't know, a liposuction van, but i'm already the office eccentric; i don't need to make things worse. i also didn't have exactly $10 and didn't fancy the awkwardness of trying to figure out whether or not to tip. after much hemming and hawing and walking around the block, i buzzed - and got no response. the universe did not want me to see the mysterious mrs. king. i decided that if i was really meant to rock the ESP today, it would throw me another psychic. it did: this place materialized as i emerged from a thrift store with a sweet $5 candlestick. a good, lucky time to have my palm read (two annoying little boys who hovered outside muttering about wasting money notwithstanding). i toyed with taking off my wedding ring and, like, coating my hands with squid ink to confuse the reader, but decided to go in as i was and roll with what she told me. here, then, is what i learned.

- i will live to be 80 or 90, and my death will not be tragic.*

- i will write something important when i'm 40.

- joe is very stubborn. his way is the only way.

- joe is my soul mate.

- in two years, we will have two children.**

- i will get a promotion in august, but someone will try to block it.

- a 35-year-old man will try to make trouble in our marriage.***

- this will be the best year of my life.

- i will take a long voyage over the ocean.****

- there is a great deal of trouble on my left side.

- i have had my palm read before.*****

*thinking about that now, it's kind of insulting, no?

**i had to challenge this one; i told her i wasn't planning on having kids. she said i would realize that our relationship was just so wonderful that we had to have children.

***it's totally going to be someone from the darts team. they will steal joe! or maybe david blaine.

****hee. i followed up on this one, too: where? she didn't know.

*****i told her no, but she was right, if you count girl scout camp. no mention of life or love lines; i was simply told i was lazy (true).

05.13.08

how i spent my stimulus act payment (or sweet liquor eases the pain):



here's hoping ginger liqueur blunts the sting of putting the vast majority toward loan repayment and epic vet bills ($400 just to confirm that the little cat's kidneys are still broken - and learn that the wily black cat's thyroid will probably crap out soon. more fun to be had at next month's follow-up tests and dentals!). i reserve the right to blow off additional steam by sending obama some cash - or by fedexing new york a few boxes of fresh turds for suggesting i trade my check for tortured baby eels at le bernardin. how about you, internets? respackling the bat cave, giving to charity, bronzing your panties? does anyone else feel weird about getting the funds as a general proposition?

on a less conflicted note, the liqueur really is amazing; i had it in a Girl Drink in monterey last month and have been thinking about it ever since. could replace zubrowka in my affections, though those are strong words.

05.09.08







mine expired as well - the foul winds of midtown snapped its spindly aluminum neck as i scuttled back from columbus circle on my lunch break - but i brought it home to our building's trash chute, so that its spirit guide will know where to find it for its final journey to umbrellavalhalla.

05.04.08