chi-town

Just back from a long weekend in Chicago, where it was sticky and hot and brilliant.

Mostly it was just a haze of eating grilled food and drinking beer with old friends and new, and laughing more than I have in a very long time. On Sunday afternoon, my hosts Dixie and Ben took me to the beach on Lake Michigan, where the water was ice cold, and our moods were high.
They regaled me with stories about their jobs, the "storefront" theater company" they work for, the hilarious characters that volunteer for Barrel of Monkeys, a wonderful not-for-profit that brings to inner city public schools a creative writing curriculum and then performs the some of the children's stories both at the schools, and for the public.

A public service announcement on Barrel of Monkeys: if you live in Chicago, Wisconsin, Indiana, or wherever, go see the B.O.M. public show, "That's Weird, Grandma," which is a selection of their very best and favorite stories. They perform every Monday, 8pm, at the Neo-Futurist Theater at 5153 N. Ashland (off of Foster). Really the best $10 I've spent in a long time. Time Out Chicago calls it, "The best reason we can think of to live in Chicago on a Monday!"

Perhaps the best punchline of the weekend, though, was the statuary on Clark Street whose slogan reads:
"For the person who has everything, say it with concrete."

The Martha Show

After some grumbling from my sister about the early wakeup call, I took her and my mother to a live taping of the MARTHA show yesterday. fun times!

We arrived at the Chelsea studios around 8:30am, a bit groggy, but excited, and we were greeted with big smiles by the audience coordinators. The whole experience was as you might imagine a Martha operation to be: in the waiting room, outfitted with immaculate white benches and large LCD screens playing clips of old shows, flawlessly dressed women with headsets passed out raffle slips and offered us vitamin water and muffins made from croissant dough. (YUM.)

It was funny, sitting amongst Martha's fan base, something you really lose touch with at the office every day. Lots of women, older than me, or my mother or my sister...Caucasian mostly. There was the odd man here and there, dragged by his wife to see the show, no doubt, and each given a dollar bill by the sympathetic audience warmup guy. I really liked being there, and I liked feeling like what I do at work actually reaches real people.

When they ushered us into the studio, we found out that they'd reserved three seats for us in the front row. (Thanks to Diane Trafford and team!) Here's my sister mugging for the camera with the gorgeous, color-coordinated set behind her (right behind that island is where Martha does most of her cooking with guests). Unfortunately, we weren't permitted to take photos during the taping of the show, and even with my little spycam, I didn't feel it would be terribly discreet of me to pull it out, sitting in the front row and all.

Martha's celebrity guest was Michael Bolton, and initially I thought my sister would be disappointed to hear that, but he was actually great. After singing the Sinatra ballad, "Once in My Life" in the greenhouse, he went over to the kitchen to make raspberry sorbet meringue cups with Martha. He was funny, and well, very handsome. (I know, don't wretch.)

Afterwards, the incomparable Calia took us for a set tour, and we got the lowdown on color choices, lighting, what happens to the greenery in the greenhouse, and why we shouldn't touch anything.

Calia snapped this photo of us in the TV kitchen. THANK YOU TO ALL for a lovely experience!

Picture of the day: a rose is a rose

Cyndi's desert rose finally opens up after a year of lying dormant and being unhappy with office radiator heat and indirect sunlight:

I should also add how absolutely thrilled I was with last night's American Idol 5 season finale. I literally sat at home, alone, shouting at the television and calling my sister during commercial breaks. I was *that* girl last night. Favorite moments? Clay Aiken's impersonator bounds around the stage for joy when his very own idol surprises him with a fab rendition of an Elton John song; David Hasselhoff cries when the winner is announced, and admiring all the BLING that the girls got to wear during their ensemble medley themed, simply, "Woman".

oh YES.

green shoes, charity search engines and general do-gooder-ness

The theme of this post is do-gooder-ness online. I have been making purchases and doing things online that will raise money or goods for great causes. And while I know consumerism is not philanthropy, if you're going to buy something, buy it well, right?

I receive a daily email that directed me to a website for Tom's Shoes -- light-as-a-feather canvas slip-ons that are inspired by a traditional Argentinian shoe -- and really liked both the design, and the business concept. You see, when you buy a pair, the CEO and "Chief Shoe Giver", Blake Mycoskie, a young gentleman with big hair, a deep tan and a little bit of chest hair, will donate the same pair to a child in need.

For $38 (+shipping), this seemed like a good deal to me. I got my Toms in the mail last week, and I love them (my color pictured above). They've got flip-flop rubber bottoms, the canvas seems tough, and the bright, visible stitching adds character to the little shoe. In fact, I needed some cheering up today, so my lime green Toms are on their first outing to the office. Every time I look at my feet, I have to smile, because I have GREEN SHOES!

Since I was one of the first people to order these shoes online, they sent me a discount code with my package. Enter 1PAIR4FEET at checkout for $5 off your purchase of Tom's Shoes. And no, I wasn't paid to promote these guys, but I should be!

SECOND. Apparently Yahoo! is powering a website called GoodSearch, where the company will donate a [very] small amount of money towards the charity of your choice every time you use their search engine. Pretty crazy, huh? Well, I guess it's one way to draw internet users away from Google. I found out about it through New York Cares, an organization that helps organize volunteer activities around the crazy work schedule of a typical New Yorker. So, check out GoodSearch.com. It's an interesting idea. I wonder how it will pan out.

Speaking of, um, interesting, my sister, mother and I are all going to be in tomorrow's TV studio audience of Martha Stewart's live morning show, and Michael Bolton's the guest! pray for me.

I saw the Da Vinci Code. And liked it.

I went to see Da Vinci Code with my work friend, Melissa, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in New York, and I really enjoyed it. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The reviews were terrible; I mean, let's face it: when People magazine, the NY Daily News *and* the NY Times share an opinion about something, you start to suspect that they might actually be right for once. They say Tom Hanks is absent of his usual affable charms [and that he has weird hair], that Audrey Tatou is better as a silent do-gooder than an alarmed cryptologist, and that the film takes longer to watch than the book does to read.

hmph.

Well, I went anyway, because Melissa's friend was playing Mary Magdalene, because we had planned our first "out-of-office" friend date around the film and because she had purchased tickets IN ADVANCE. There was no turning around. Besides, Sunday was an exhausting day of apartment hunting, sporadic rain showers and a trip into Brooklyn. I wanted to see a movie, even if it'd been scorned by virtually all people who know about movies.

I guess we weren't the only ones with the idea. Here's Gawker's fantastic Monday morning post on the topic:


You said it, anonymous Gawker intern.

You know, I'm not really sure why I read criticism at all. I think it might be because I think it's the intellectual thing to do, the thing any college-educated, media-employed young woman *should* do before she goes to enjoy any art or performance. Look, I was a religion major in college -- I was even considering doing a thesis about the Gnostic gospels -- and I know there are major fundamental flaws with Dan Brown's "theory" for the church's "con of man." I know that the movie wouldn't be nearly as popular if there didn't exist this great beach/airplane read whose sales seem to have blown every other book in history (other than the Bible, ironically) out of the water. I know that this book has its naysayers among writers, publishers, organized religions and intellectuals.

But I'm no movie critic. I enjoy movies. I get scared when you're supposed to get scared, I laugh at Ian McKellan playing a silly caricature of a person, I get emotional when elements of family and personal history are EVER introduced. Simple-minded me. I just think it's a great summer film. Sometimes you've got to let your brain relax a little, sit back, enjoy the car chases and the homing devices and the Christian imagery with a tub of popcorn and Milk duds. So that's what I did.

podunk tea room, and scattering friends

I had tea last night with two of my friends, Anri and Christina, who are leaving the fair city of New York for Brazil and San Francisco, respectively, in search of adventure, oppportunity, romance. Well, that, and they decided they were tired of me. So, in honor of all these things, I organized a little tea gathering at Podunk Tearoom, and I think we found a real gem amid the grimey hum of the East Village.

When I arrived, the warm lighting and mismatched furniture was a welcome refuge from the darkening skies overhead, and Christina reported that a women called Elspeth, clad in a floral smock and baker's cap -- the proprietor of the place -- welcomed her into the tearoom well before our meeting time so that Tina could escape the rain.

We ordered the "Old Friends Tea" set menu to share, which promised of scones (plain and strawberry), cakes (cardomam and cupcake), cookies (small chocolate chip) and cucumber sandwiches. It was yummy, and a tray for two was plenty for the three of us. We spent about $20 each, and sat for more than two hours together. Well worth every penny, and hopefully justified the trek for my friends down to the East Village.

The place was wonderful, and the conversation lovely, and I am sad that I won't be able to make our visit to Podunk a weekly gathering. But if you are in the East Village, and looking for a place to camp down with a new book or an old friend, this is your place.

More about Podunk's 2002 opening here. And a little blog piece, on my second favorite New York blog, Gothamist, here.

Paula Abdul and I have great taste

I have to confess. I love American Idol. And only a show that's being watched by 30 million Americans each week could own a headline like this:



Well, like, duh.

For those culturally-impaired among you (out-of-tune, obviously, with Rupert Murdoch's grand scheme to hypnotize all of America with his Fox network talent show), Elliott was the crooked-toothed, Elf-eared Virginian with the great vibrato, who made it to the semi-finals of the show. And boy was he lovely. And in addititon to winning my little sentimental heart, he was Paula Abdul's fave, too (ever since "Cold Hearted Snake," I *knew* we were on the same wavelength!). Last night he was eliminated from the competition by a mere .002% of the 50 million votes (though to be fair to the runner up, that's still 100,000 votes).

I would guess that this is one of Yahoo!'s most popular articles this lazy Thursday afternoon. And trust me when I say that there's absolutely NO NEWS at all in this piece, unless, of course, you didn't know that Elliott is 90% deaf in one ear.

He made a fantastic underdog, he did.

Taxi Driver Punditry and Party BuddYS

I almost have no time at all to post today, but I have two funny tidbits I thought people might enjoy:

* An anchor on BBC news mistook a taxi driver for an internet expert in the lobby of the television studios, and without double-checking his identity, went on-air and interviewed him briefly about the Apple versus Apple trademark battle. Three questions were asked, and the anchor didn't even seem to raise an eyebrow. This brings self-proclaimed punditry to another level! Click here for the video clip.

* And here's another thing a friend recently alerted me to, that I find utterly ridiculous: ever want to be a celebrity for a night? Apparently you can go to Party Buddys, a "lifestyle" service that makes you feel like a celebrity for a day, complete with your own paparazzi, entourage ("groupies"), bodyguards and V.I.P. club service. Alright, alright. I get that some people might go for this, but seriously, can we spell the plural of "buddy" correctly, at least?

Could someone please do this and tell me how it is? Or more importantly, how much it'll set you back?

"peopleblog worth reading", and my sister graduates from COLLEGE!

Well, here's something darn exciting: Jeff Yang, Asian pop columnist for SFGate.com, gave me a more-than-decent shout out in his bi-weekly mailblog! You'll recall from my post, Asian-ness, that Jeff had surveyed his readers about their definition of the word "Asian," and what it has grown to mean in an increasingly fractured and complex social landscape. So I responded, naturally, as I have many thoughts on the topic, and he excerpted from my verbal diarrhea, linking also to this very blog in his email. If you want to check out what resulted from his survey, here is his column this month, "An Asian Occasion." You can subscribe to his mailblog by clicking here.

I first saw Jeff speak at the Asian American Journalist Association's mini-conference in New York, and thought he had some really interesting insights on the role and responsibilities of the blogger. I am extremely flattered to be on his list of "PeopleBlogs Worth Reading."

This post is of a rather more personal nature, as I spent the weekend with my family, and thought, in the theme of Asian-ness, I'd show you a couple of pictures of all of them.

My sister graduated from Boston University on Sunday with a B.A. from the College of Arts and Sciences. hurrah! What was less a cause for celebration was the weather in Boston over the weekend -- in the 40 degree range with the *most* rain Boston's gotten in 10 years or something -- throughout which we had to move both my brother and sister out of their college housing, and sit through an outdoor set of commencement exercises, at which the head of CBS, Les Moonves, was the keynote speaker. It was all very surreal.

This is the happiest my sister looked all weekend.

The scene of the crime:

The players:


We look strangely happy, don't we? Well, I think we're all smiling because of the utter silliness of the situation -- freezing, underdressed -- really the only thing we could do was laugh. Of course, we are so proud of our Sammi, so...congratulations Mei Mei!

conversation clusters, and personal space suit.

Thank you all for the positive responses to my Lilac Ball post! Very grateful indeed, both for my colleagues' confidence in me, and my friends' support. I love everybody! (Please refer me back to this post whenever you find me e-whining.)

I thought I'd leave you with fun things to look at this weekend. On Wednesday night, I attended the Spring Show of the Interactive Telecommunications Progam at NYU Tisch, where many of their full-time graduate students -- designers, multimedia experts, artists, geeks -- had their senior projects on display.

Here are two that I noted in particular:

Demetrie Tyler's Hypothetical Drawings About Real People:
In this piece, which you should go to the website to see in detail, you'll see line drawings of crude-looking figures, surrounded and overlapped by snippets of random conversation.

His site explains that he's developed software that can filter "conversational" content from the Web (prioritizing sites like MySpace and blogs) from factual content (like Wikipedia), separating "good" from "bad." I find this fascinating, particuarly with all the blogging and user-generated content that has consumed the new Web revolution. Then he's taken these little blurbs and created conversation clusters, and ultimately, a kind of social landscape represented in drawing.

I think this is TRES cool.

The other project that I loved was based on a much simpler, but no less fundamental concept: personal space. Terence Arjo, another ITP student, created the "Personal Space Suit," a suit that protects, well, your personal space. It has a sensor built into the fabric, and if you get too close to the suit, it deploys needle-like quills that rest flat on the suit normally. The quills rise dangerously straight, but slowly, organically almost, in a kind of mammalian basic instinct sort of way. It reminded me very much of the way a cat's hair straightens on its back, or of a porcupine trying to ward off its prey.

Check out his blog devoted to personal space.

Anyway, food for thought. Have a good weekend everyone, and see you next week.

going to the Lilac Ball.

This is the invitation to Prep for Prep's Annual Lilac Ball, held always at the Waldorf-Astoria, and primarily to honor the graduates of the program.

And THIS is listed on the back of a lilac-colored insert (check out the 15th name down the list):
Cool, huh? My first name-printed-in-a-program!

I apologize for the unbearably bad photography, but I wanted to share this with you all! Basically the honorees, The Cashins, had the idea of inviting professionals to network with the students (I believe this is the first time they're doing this), and called the community relations and foundation departments at various companies around New York. In a funny turn of events, the head of our foundation, Jean Graham, asked me to represent Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, without knowing that I'm a Prep alum!

So, I guess I'm an "up-and-coming" executive. Terrifying.

Things that made me laugh today

* Model [pictured left] falls out of her bus [going 40 mph] on Gowanus parkway because she thought the exit door led to the Little Girls' Room (NY Daily News, Gawker)

* Gawker succintly makes "performance artist" David Blaine look like a jackass. Of course, we all already felt this, but just didn't articulate it as well. (Gawker)

* This photo of an aged Jason Kidd rubbing his teammate's head.

* Ex-child star Kenan Thompson and his outfit make a splash on Go Fug Yourself.

* "Teens who take virginity pledges can't be trusted..." from my new favorite column on Slate.com.

* Ze Frank's daily show.

Fear of Driving

As an alum of two car crashes myself, I have noted with particular interest the new, violently surprising Volkswagen ad campaign. If you haven't seen them yourself, I would beg you to watch them here first.

Of course, if you're not an internet video person (I'm just starting to warm up to this concept myself), then I will try to explain the ads, though I may not do them justice. Imagine cruising home in a car after a long evening with some friends, talking about the events of the night, mini-issues with significant others, laughing, decompressing and then, another car slams into you, or a truck backs out of a hidden driveway. Imagine, in a moment, totally losing your orientation, jerking in your seat, hearing the crunching sound of metal, and after the split-second you've used to assess that nothing's broken on you, you look around for your friends.

That's what it's like to be in a car crash...except that it happens in a fraction of the time that it took you to read that. And it's depicted in these VW ads.

I've never tried to buy a car (and highly doubt that I'll get to a point or place where I'll need to), but as the Slate article says, I can't imagine in the past that young people have bought cars with safety on the mind. Now, instead of targeting cautious soccer moms, VW is trying to scare the living hell out of folks like us, so that maybe we'll reconsider. If two guys talking about girls while rolling down a pretty harmless-looking suburban street can get into a mess like that, why couldn't we? In both of the crashes I've been involved with, I was in cars of a Honda-make, and I feel lucky for that. Well, I feel lucky in general, but those cars are safe. And when you flip your car -- as I did, first because of rain and second because of a deer on the parkway -- you want to be in a safe car.

So...the big question is, will fear translate into sales? I have to say, I'm convinced. I'm VERY convinced. If VW has "highest government side impact rating", I want it.

*** The Washington Post's take on the ad campaign.

"WHAM" image from www.dynamicduostudio.com/ main/editorial.htm.

Asian-ness

I started my weekend answering written questions about my associations with the word "Asian", a response to a biweekly mailblog I receive from Jeff Yang, a columnist for SFGate.com. He was asking his readership to tell him what "Asian" meant to them, and here is an excerpt from my candid response:

1. Do you think of yourself as Asian? Why or why not? Do your parents? When was the first time you referred to yourself as 'Asian'?

"I don't think I ever refer to myself as Asian except in jest, as in, "Well, *I* can say that because I'm Asian," or more commonly, "That's SO Asian," but I've not found many other occasions to really to identify myself or anything else as Asian, at least verbally,

"I feel a certain amount of guilt (now "guilt," THAT is "Asian" for you) about not using the term more often, given that I've spent the last three years trying to cultivate a more multi-cultural post-graduate persona for myself. The fact of the matter is, though, that when you are surrounded by non-Asians all day, at a school, or at work, at home, you don't think about the area of the world from which you come, all that much,

"Come to think of it, in my adult life, I think I use 'Asian' most frequently when my friends and I have the distinct sense that I'm being courted because I am Asian-looking. I believe 'Asian persuasion' is the term for a man who finds himself in the custom of only dating or pursuing young Asian things, and of course there's also the more racially-loaded, 'Yellow fever.' I hear it, and prescribe it to myself, quite often. It's a painful insecurity, and in the past I have been skeptical of any person's motives, if they are perfectly nice, if they've dated someone Asian directly before seeing me."

2. Stream of consciousness: What ideas immediately come to mind when you think of the word Asian?

"My idea of this had changed a great deal since spending actual time on the continent of Asia. Before, I'd probably say it reminded me of crowded market streets, bargaining, the white noise of Cantonese and Mandarin, thriftiness, queue-cutting, spitting, red envelopes, lazy susans, wedding banquets, white rice, cheong-sams, porcelain, mishandling chopsticks, my gambling grandfather, one-room tenement apartments, hand-me-down children's clothes and black-and-white photos,
"Now, I'd say it reminded me of the different shades of brown -- no, not yellow -- that Asians get in the sun. It reminds me that it's normal in Asia to keep one's skin as pale as possible by exhaustively using parasols and wearing full-length jeans on the beach in the summer. It makes me think of linen, bicycles, bicycles, bicycles, grime, smog, minibuses, overcrowded train cars, chicken bones, rice paddies, terracotta shingles, woven baskets, gorgeous flight attendants, orchids blossoms, cherry blossoms, temples, mosques, incense, banyan trees, deserts, fortresses and animal intestines soaked in brine."

I've added a couple of photos I took while I was away in Asia, the first during Songkran (Thai New Year) of a boy at the Royal Palace in Bangkok, and the second of young boys outside Jama Masjid (Old Mosque) in Delhi, India.

Tell me where you've been.

Note: this is a complete ripoff of a post my friend Sara writes on her wonderful blog from Hong Kong, but I'm doing it anyway. Thank you, Sara, for finding this!

With three extra sections of pages in my passport to accomodate countless stamps (that I sometimes look at before I go to bed at night, to remind myself of more fancy-free times), and after visiting 25 countries so far in my life, I've only seen an incredible 11% of the world. I feel both excited and terrified by how much there still is to see.

To create your *own* visited countries map, click here.

As an added bonus, here is my United States map. I once met a person at a party who recited how many states he'd been to, and I found him moderately obnoxious. I wonder if introducing this concept on the blog makes me a hypocrite...hm. Well, here is my map anyway: 23 states totaling about 45% of the country.

What's your total?

art makes you feeeel good.

Tonight is the opening of a small art show in the gallery of the Williams Club, featuring two of my very good friends and curated by another:


Here are a couple of samples of their work, a mixed media sculpture in a series of Eliza's [left], and one of Emily's paintings [right]. (I apologize for the unruly, slightly out-of-proportion images, but that's what you get on blogger.com. It's always a crapshoot with the layout.)










I am awfully curious to see what the space looks like -- they've converted some area adjacent to the basement pub into a permanent gallery, it seems -- as I am often suspicious of the Williams Club hosting anything "modern." Heavy, wall-to-wall carpeting, dark wood-paneled walls and heavy, sliding doors do not a good art space make, and the building in midtown Manhattan reminds its visitors that not so long ago, Williams College was a male-dominated environment in which cigar smoking was probably permitted and back-slapping was commonplace.

Nonetheless, join me there, if you've got nothing else on! I'm sure I'd love to see you.

a "Beacon" of good living, and Z(S)adie Smith

Had another weekend full of art and culture, and felt revived by it. I find the city incredibly intense and disorienting at times, and relish weekends if for nothing but the leisurely pace, and a little bit of sun on my skin.

So, my roommates and I decided to bring a picnic and go to the Dia: Beacon museum on Saturday morning -- 250,000 square feet of [mostly] American art, in a renovated warehouse north of the city that used to be devoted to printing boxes for Nabisco cookies. Because the museum is adjacent to the Beacon MetroNorth station, it was easily accesible to little city mice like us.

In a New York Times article devoted to the space, Dia Art Foundation Trustee and Barnes and Noble chairman, Leonard Riggio is quoted as saying:

"...This is a place that makes humans feel better for being there.''

Of course, there are no cameras allowed in the galleries, but I snapped a few quick photos with my little spycam (pictured here are works by John Chamberlain and Richard Serra.




* * *

This weekend I was also lucky enough to see Zadie Smith in "conversation" with Kurt Andersen, fantastic writers both -- she of fiction, and he of non-fiction. Despite her deep, almost masculine Willesden accent and constant fidgeting and scratching, we were a captive audience, and I felt very akin to her writerly "self-disgust" [as she called it] and doubt.


She was really open about everything:
* her real name ("Sadie...I changed it because I was in love with a boy whose name started with 'Z' so I thought I'd show him solidarity by joining him at the other end of the alphabet");
* choices for her characters (Kiki in *On Beauty* is a heavy woman because Smith could relate to those who had undergone a massive physical change -- she from chubby to slim, and vice-versa for her character);
* how she felt about people saying that the only reason her book was published was that she sent her photo along with it ("really angry"),
* being called a "postcolonial author" or an author that addressed "multiculturalism" ("I just write my reality, and that reality just happens to be multicultural...but I have no wisdom about these things");
* and what it's like to follow up a debut novel like *White Teeth* ("I'm thirty and grew up in a generation enormously suspicious of very popular things, and so when 5 million people bought my book, you can imagine how I felt about it").

People love to hate her, but I think I just love her.