Nylon

I haven’t picked up a classical guitar for at least a year, and it’s been two or three since I was practicing regularly. But, in the move, I found mine under the bed, pulled it out, dusted it off, and promptly broke two of the five strings.

While my parents were in town, my father kindly popped in to Rayburn to secure the cheapest classical strings they had. (As he explained to the clerk who tried to push a far nicer set, I’m an experienced trumpet player, but a terrible guitarist, and my father was rightly sure I couldn’t tell the difference between one set of strings and another.)

This morning, at a mind-numbingly slow pace, I restrung and wound and wound and wound the new set. And then, I pulled out Mills’ Student Repertoire, and slowly worked my way through a handful of songs: Fernando Sor’s “Study in C (Opus 31, No. 1)”, a Ferdinando Carulli Andantino, and a Dionisio Aguado Lesson.

The sharp strings were cutting into the uncalloused fingers of my left hand, and it took me a slew of passes on each piece to make my way through error-free. But I was also reminded of how much I love the sound of classical guitar (and have since, as a small child, I used to fall asleep every night to a record of Julian Bream lute suites, The Woods So Wild). And, even more so, how satisfying it is to make that sound myself.

August 17, 2015

Episodic

Back in my movie days, I used to watch the first couple episodes of any hit TV show. Casting directors would often suggest actors by throwing out a name, followed by ‘you know, the Dad from Heroes’ or ‘the youngest brother on Malcolm in the Middle.’ I needed to keep up.

That’s how I ended up at the Blockbuster near my old apartment, back in 2002, renting a DVD of the first four episodes of the first season of 24. It was a Friday afternoon, and I had dinner plans with friends, but I figured I’d have time to watch at least the first episode or two before I headed out.

Two episodes in, I called my friends to cancel dinner. Four episodes in, I headed back to Blockbuster, to trade that DVD for the second. And then, the next morning, I headed back for the third, and the fourth that afternoon. By that evening, I’d watched the entire first season of 24 in less than 24 hours time.

Of course, in today’s Netflix-enabled world, binge-watching is commonplace. Fire up a season of Hannibal, True Detective or Orange is the New Black, and it’s nearly impossible not to be propelled from one episode to the next, bedtime be damned.

At the same time, I’m also still a big movie fan, watching an array of mainstream and indie releases, new and old. And I frequently find, three quarters of the way through a film, that I just really no longer care what happens. I’m hoping it will wrap up shortly, can barely imagine watching another 30 minutes, much less six to eight hours, of the same story playing out.

I’ve long wondered about the reason for that gap. Perhaps it’s the difference in pacing between film and television, or TV episodes’ frequent cliffhanger structure. Perhaps it’s our willingness to give early episodes of a series the benefit of the doubt, and then the relationship we build with characters that keeps us in for the season’s balance. But it’s something I’ve heard a slew of other people mention, too. You can pop TV episodes like they’re Pringles – once you start, you can’t stop; but edit a film to longer than 90 minutes, and it’s an uphill battle to keep an audience in their seats.

July 9, 2015

Immune to Poison

While it’s more overtly driven by money than film or television, advertisement can be a great storytelling medium nonetheless. I love this spot each time it comes on, as it captures something essential about being a dude:

Definitely Clio-worty.

June 2, 2015

Frieze

Friday evening, Jess and I drove out to Randall’s Island, the little patch under the Triborough bridge that houses the Manhattan Psychiatric Center and the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center for the criminally insane. This past weekend, appropriately enough, it also housed Frieze, New York’s largest contemporary art fair.

For three days, nearly 200 galleries from around the world set up shop in a long, serpentine, tent-like building, displaying their priciest, most inscrutable pieces on white pop-up gallery walls. A few of the pieces were spectacular (we coveted a pair of large Alex Katz’s in particular), and a handful were disturbing, thought-provoking or funny in memorable ways.

But, by and large, the art was eclipsed by the crowd. Collect the arterati from New York, Berlin, Tokyo and beyond, and you have an amazing array of people all trying their hardest to look like they’re not trying hard at all. The ennui was palpable, and I spent most of the time with the Ben Folds Five’s Battle of Who Could Care Less stuck in my head. “Do you not hear me anymore / I know it’s cool to be so bored / I know it’s not your thing to care.”

Jess spent most of the time marveling at the clothing worn, most of it a far throw from the carefully-proscribed strictures of Fashion Week cool that she’s used to seeing. The dominant Frieze style appeared to be “expensive basics assembled mismatchingly by blind drunk”, though at least a few people also seemed to be wearing stuff pulled from Zoolander’s Derelicte.

Then, of course, there were the Milanese and Roman galleries, instead full of young men wearing impeccable suits with sprezzatura. Proving, as ever, that an excellent suit is never out of place. Or, at least, that we should all wish we were Italian.

May 18, 2015

Hungry Dragons

When I was growing up, my parents would read to my brother and me before we went to bed. My mother would read a chapter of one book to me in my room, while my father read a chapter of another book to my brother in his, and then they’d swap.

My mother’s taste ran to Dickens and Bronte, while my father’s fell closer to Herbert and Tolkien. Between the two, I had listened my way through an exceedingly wide array of novels before my tenth birthday.

I think it was that nighttime reading, more than anything else, that instilled in me a love of fiction, kept me tearing my way through books in all the years since. But though I’ve dug deep through literary fiction, I must admit I’ve mostly strayed from fantasy and sci-fi.

A few years ago, on the strong recommendation of the inimitable Sarah Brown, I picked up and quickly devoured the His Dark Materials trilogy. Those books reminded me that there’s very little as deeply engrossing as an entire parallel world, carefully detailed and full of intrigue.

Even so, I still don’t think of fantasy as a genre I really read. Which is why, perhaps, I’m so late to the game in discovering both the Hunger Games series (thanks to Jess) and the A Song of Fire and Ice series (thanks to HBO’s Game of Thrones).

If you, too, haven’t read either or both (or the aforementioned His Dark Materials, for that matter), pick them up, and clear out some time in your schedule. Once you start, you won’t put them down.

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October 2, 2011

Crunched

TechCrunch is more or less required reading in the tech world. Yet slogging through the huge number of posts previously took me nearly twenty minutes each day.

Recently, however, I started routing TechCrunch’s RSS feed through [FeedBurner](http://feedburner.google.com/), to create a daily summary email – each of the posts boiled down to just 300 words. Now I can skim the headlines and summaries, and click through to the rare article I want to read in its entirety, all in about two minutes.

Try it yourself.

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July 17, 2011

Buy This Now

I headed to Barnes & Noble this morning to pick up a copy of Sarah Brown’s new book, Cringe, which just went on sale today.

Cringe is “a compilation of real teenage diary and journal entries, letters,
songs, stories, and lists–along with biting commentary, background, and self-examination from the now so-called grown-ups who wrote them.”

Which includes me. And also a great lineup of people far, far funnier than I am.

And, lest you think I’m biased, when I was checking out with the book, the B&N sales girl started paging through, laughed out loud several times, and made a note on a sticky to head upstairs and pick up a copy for herself.

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August 26, 2008