Wow, I can't believe I haven't written anything here for nearly two months! Well, yes I can believe it . . . time just slips by, doesn't it?

As it gets close to the end of the year, I sometimes find myself shocked to realize that I've been here that long. Many mornings as I ascend the steps from my apartment to the street, it still feels like I'm on a movie set: Cue the New York extras -- the lawyers and brokers with their briefcases schlepping to the subways, the students heading to St. Francis College with their computer backpacks, the nannies with their strollers, the moms and dads dropping off kids at St. Ann's School before grabbing a train to the office.

One key extra in my daily script is the doorman at the building across the street. I've never met him, but a few months ago, he started waving to me as I left the apartment every morning. It's a simple smile-and-nod relationship, but it makes me feel secure, like he's going to make sure nothing bad happens while I'm gone.

As I walk through Brooklyn Heights to Dumbo, where my office is, I sometimes find myself saying, "Holy crap, I'm living in Brooklyn! How did this happen?"

As with life anywhere, much of my life here is routine: Work, groceries, laundry, movies. But I find that I deal with certain chores very differently here than I would have in Seattle.

Take laundry, for example. Here, I go to a laundromat, whereas in Seattle I had a washer and dryer in my house. So I have to set aside an evening to do laundry. Because it's more of a project than it used to be, I find that I can go a lot longer between trips to the laundromat than I ever would have imagined. But I try to go on certain nights that I know are not busy. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are usually good. Friday night is what I call Loser Night -- only people without plans end up doing the wash on Friday -- but this is an occasion when it's great to be a loser because you're guaranteed to get washers and dryers when you want them.

I fill up my wheeled cart, a gift from Sophie, and roll it to the Expressway Laundromat on Atlantic Avenue, which is about three blocks from my house. I rarely do laundry on weekends because the laundromat is waaaaay too crowded, and the patrons way too cranky and competitive, on Saturdays and Sundays. And I still have not succumbed to the temptation to drop off my laundry - maybe next year. That's partly because I've watched the Chinese women who run Expressway work their butts off doing other people's laundry and don't want to burden them. Such a chick reaction, I know - but whaddaya gonna do?

I often combine my laundry chores with grocery shopping at Trader Joe's, which is an avenue and a half from the laundromat. I dash down there while my clothes are in the washer, pick up a few things, and dash back. This TJ's, by the way, is in an old bank building that is very grand and elegant. Oddly, even here, the clerks have that same friendly-happy-helpful quality that they have in Seattle. Wish it was something they could bottle and feed to the you're-standing-in-front-of-me-but-I'm-pretending-I-don't-see-you clerks at the Key Market down the street.

On another topic, Ian's back in town, and last weekend we had a nice little adventure. Ian said he felt like he'd spent a weekend in some European city -- and I agree. We went uptown to see a David Hockney exhibit and ended up strolling along Madison Avenue and in and out of a couple of shops: the Gagosian Gallery's retail store, where you can buy $100,000 gifts for all your friends, and Fred Leighton, a jewelry store that sells mostly vintage pieces from the last several centuries. Even though we were in our rain gear and didn't look like money, the guy there welcomed us in and took out several pieces for us to look at. The loveliest was a pair of gold pins in the shape of hands - $40K, but who's counting?

After our nonshopping spree and lunch at Viande, a New York style deli that specializes in turkey, we finally made it to the Hockney at Pace Wildenstein on 57th- new landscape pieces that I found so-so. Then downtown to Chelsea, where we were planning to see the second part of the Hockney show but got sidetracked by the Richard Serra exhibit at the Gagosian. I love Serra, and these two pieces were particularly great because, as you walk into them, they somehow seem to be lots bigger than they look from the outside. From above (as you can see if you look at the images on the gallery's web site), they look like giant eyes.

From there, we headed to a great little store called Printed Matter that sells mostly small-press and art books, posters, and the like - many small editions produced by artists, well known and unknown. Then on the Angelika to see the Argentine movie The Maid - a really wonderful family story that I've been thinking about ever since I saw it. When it comes to Seattle, you should definitely see it.

An amazing day in New York - not least because Ian is so much fun to spend time with.

Eleven months in and more to come. I've just signed my lease for 2010 . . .

So much to do, so little time

I can't believe it's been a month since I wrote something here. Explains why I'm also not a good Tweeter.

It's been a busy month - trying to fit in some stuff before summer's gone, which is definitely is now. It seems to have happened so suddenly here. You don't get those midnight-sun kind of nights here that you get in the Northwest. Dusk descends with alarming speed.

Some catch-up stuff: I met up with Melissa and Sophie on Governor's Island the weekend before last, on a glorious summer evening. The 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's landing in the vicinity came with all sorts of Dutch events, as well as these lovely reproduction ships that mimicked the ones on which Hudson and crew came here.

Hudson's exploration prompted the Dutch to come check it out, thus explaining all those "kills" upstate in lieu of rivers. And of course, Brooklyn is named after the Dutch town of Breukelen, where Melissa's Mom, Angela, was born. (She said to me once that she never imagined growing up in Breukelen that she'd have a daughter who would one day live in Brooklyn.)

Back to Governor's Island, where one of the booths for the Dutch festival offered the opportunity to make poffertjes, little Dutch pancakes that puff up like balls and are then sprinkled with powdered sugar and eaten. Yum!

This past weekend, I spent half of (a rainy) Sunday volunteering at the Showtime Showhouse, which is a designer showcase that benefits a charity here called Housing Works. HW runs a bunch of really fabulous thrift stores, which, as you all know, are my favorite sort of store. Various rooms in the house were based on Showtime shows like Dexter (about a forensic scientist/serial killer with a heart of gold - sort of), Californication (screenwriter/sex addict), Weeds (mom grows pot to support her family after her husband dies), and The Tudors (Henry VIII et al).

The rooms were all very different - you can get sort of an idea here, as were the people who strolled through. My job was to explain things (by consulting a brochure), answer questions, and keep people from pawing the merch. The highlight was when a skinny, scruffy guy of 70-plus whirled in, wearing a crumpled raincoat, reeking of smoke, and bursting with questions. He even had a messy shopping bag filled with papers to set off the eccentric look. His questions were interesting, though, and he was clearly a designer or architect (he had great horn rim glasses, always a sure sign of a design professional).

He said he wanted to create a cross-shaped light sculpture using LED lights but he didn't know anything about the technology. One of the art pieces in the showhouse (actually two penthouses in Tribeca - $14 million or so each) was a giant LED eye. My entreaties not to touch it didn't make any difference to him - he was lifting and shifting and trying to discern the secrets of its construction.

After about 20 minutes of cross-examining me (I felt like I was in grad school) about the lighted eye and other art pieces in the Dexter rooms, he said, "Have you ever heard of Knoll furniture?" I said sure. He said, "I'm Peter Knoll" and then swirled out just as quickly as he had come in.

I checked around the web and couldn't find anything specifically about Peter Knoll - a rarity these days - but I think he was who he said he was. Hope I get to see his LED cross one of these days.

Last Thursday night I went to see the new production of Othello with Philip Seymour Hoffman. It got a crappy review in the Times this week, and with some good cause. The acting was incredible - I don't think I've ever seen anything like it on the stage (not that I've seen that much theater, and never a production of Othello). But four hours is a bit long for most audiences, and the ultra-modern touches (some characters never appear - lines are spoken to them over cell phones) were a little too-too.

Still, a great cast, and it's fun to see something in previews, before the reviews come out.

One last thing: Did you know there was a term for people like Sophie and me who are here from the NW? We're ex-PACs, and last week the new Ace Hotel at 29th and B-way had a party for us. Lotsa flannel in the crowd but nothing really all that PAC about it, frankly. But Sophie and I had fun anyway. (The Ace is a spinoff of the ones in Seattle and Portland, BTW.)

More later from the ex-PACs. Hope you're all well and happy and enjoying fall.

Crossing over . . . and over

Just got back from a three-bridge walk - across the Brooklyn Bridge, under the Manhattan Bridge, and back to Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge. The mnemomic device for the order of the bridges, south to north, is BMW. Easy, right?

Our leader, a guy in his late sixties named Cy, showed up in pinstriped baseball pants and an ancient cap with "Shorewalkers" imprinted on it. He had a way of stopping at certain points along the walk as if he had some amazing bit of history or lore to impart, only to tell us that we had five minutes to use the bathroom in a park or a cafe.

We started out at the Manhattan Municipal Building, built around the turn of the last century and designed by McKim, Mead & White in classical and Italian Renaissance style. It sits just next to the Brooklyn Bridge and across from City Hall, and still functions as the main office of city government. This area of Lower Manhattan is really lovely - though I'm guessing that as many people visit it to go to J&R Electronics and Century 21 (a discount department store) as are there to see the historic sites.

Up and over the bridge we went, fighting the tourist and stroller tide on this lovely wasn't-it-supposed-to-rain sort of Sunday. Then back under the bridge through Dumbo, right past my office, under the Manhattan Bridge and on to Vinegar Hill.

Vinegar Hill is a nabe that overlooks that old Brooklyn Navy Yard and was settled by Irish immigrants and named after a place in Ireland that was the site of a battle with the British during the Irish Rebellion of the late 18th century. Several charming streets remain - little slices of brownstone and frame, store-fronted houses surrounded by Dumbo, city electrical substations, warehouses, a large soundstage, and a huge public housing project (many people here still call them projects - not the polite Seattle nomenclature - public housing).

On we marched to Fort Greene, the centerpiece of which is Fort Greene Park, a large space that was in fact the location of a fort and is therefore on high ground with grand views (this is where yesterday's Michael Jackson birthday party was supposed to have been held before it was moved to the much larger Prospect Park). Surrounding the park are leafy streets lined with brownstones and large Victorian and Edwardian mansions with wide staircases and genteel porches (though many of the mansions have been broken up into apartments.

From there we made our way to an area of Williamsburg that is home to a sect of Hassidic Jews called Satmar. One of my walk-mates told me that this group is particularly insular and traditional, which seemed evident on the street. Men in black coats and hat and women with their heads covered and little boys with the traditional curls. All of the children wore contemporary clothing but in a more conservative style - dresses and tights - very covered up. Except for the trendy strollers and one (Satmar) woman in Chanel and gold leather flats, it really felt like you were walking back in time. What's incredible about this neighborhood is that it's not walled off or anything - it's insular in the middle of the diversity and worldliness of the huge borough of Brooklyn. How you accomplish that through belief and tradition alone is hard to imagine. It's faith and devotion personified.

We stopped at a little cafe on Lee Street where the food was all kosher, of course, and very good. Middle Eastern in character and all freshly made - grilled vegetables, shawarma, pita, and Israeli salad (cukes and tomatoes). Like a lot of inexpensive New York eateries, it was a plain place in decor terms, but with excellent food.

By now our group had dwindled in size as some people headed off to explore the trendier confines of Bedford Avenue in Billyburg, where hipsters parade their angst and their pricey sneakers. There's art, yes, and chic boutiques and espresso - in fact, one of my Pine Street Cottage neighbors, J.D., owns two coffee shops in Williamsburg, both called Oslo (he and his family live in Brooklyn most of the time and in Seattle in the summer).

The remaining 15 or so us of the group headed towards the Williamsburg Bridge, which has walkways/bikeways on both sides. To my surprise, the Williamsburg span had lovely art nouveau detailing at both ends. Between, it's rather utilitarian as a structure, but there was tons of interesting graffitti, which you don't see on the Brooklyn Bridge, and way fewer tourists. Also, on the car level below us, we witnessed a car fire -

The Williamsburg Bridge empties out on to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, where the walking group parted company. I went north to Tompkins Square Park to take in a little of the Charlie Parker Jazz Fest before heading home - a nice little respite after an 8-mile walk.

Next time you come to New York, I'll take you on this walk myself, and I promise to have more historic info in hand than Cy.

Bye for now.

Dual-purpose weekend

Last Saturday: I would never have expected to go to a national park and see laundry hanging from a line strung between trees. But there it was, on Governor's Island, where there were two events competing for visitors' attention: a camp of Civil War reenactors and an African-American culture festival. A perfect combo on one level, but an unusual one on another. Nonetheless, the feet-on-the-ground African dance lessons, with drum accompaniment, didn't seem in conflict with the occasional cannon blast from the (faux) Grand Army of the Republic. (The laundry belonged to the GAR folks.)

That's the kind of thing that happens on Governor's Island, a former military installation (for two centuries) that was nearly doubled in size ages ago when it was filled out with dirt from subway excavations. Now, you can bike or walk around it (about the same distance as walking around Green Lake) or rent a six-person pedal carriage sort of vehicle (it has pedals in the two front and middle seats, so four people can pedal at once). There are old officers quarters, a former military prison, lots of contemporary art work, and much open space on the old parade grounds and here and there around the island. They're still tearing down some of the more contemporary buildings on the island and that will add to the open space.

The only way to get to Governor's Island is by free ferry - it's only a 10-minute ride from Lower Manhattan, but, as this is New York, you have to wait in line for 45 minutes or longer on weekends to take this brief excursion. The ferry slip had a sign stenciled on it that said "At the Same Moment." Not sure what that means, but it was certainly a big topic of discussion among the passengers. Interestingly, the return ferry had signs indicating that one side was for Sheep and the other for Goats. (I was directed to the Sheep side, which is good because, as you know, Sheep go to Heaven and Goats go to Hell.)

Last Sunday, I landed in an entirely different New York landscape - the West Village - where I took a literary/dessert tour nominally in honor of the 81st birthday of Andy Warhol. Our guide was part of a great little company called NYC Discovery Tours, which does history and literary walks through various city nabes. I've done a few of these tour walks, and these folks are definitely the best.

Among the highlights: I learned that lovely Washington Square was a burial ground at one point, and the bodies are still there. Basically, the park was constructed over them. Many were paupers or, sadly, criminals who had been hanged from a large tree that still thrives in the park. Looking down on this cemetery at various points were Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Wharton, among others.

Another highlight was the desserts - cannoli freshly made for us in a little bakery on Bleecker called Rocco's, and rugelach fresh from the oven at a place on Hudson (I forgot to write down the name).

The tour ended at one of the later locations of Andy Warhol's Factory and the place where he was shot. It's actually the Decker Building on Union Square, an area that now seems so upscale that it's hard to imagine it as a radical art enclave (the Williamsburg BK of its day). The Factory is now a hangout for fashion models, according to our guide.

This weekend's plans: a walk around BK, from Bay Ridge to Manhattan Beach, and maybe a look at a John Currin exhibit in Chelsea. What are you up to?

Family vacation

No, not my family - Susanne's. Rusty, her brother his wife, Amy, and their son John. Cousin David, his wife, Debbie, and their daughter, Wendy. The weekend before last, I met up with Susanne in Ithaca and then drove up to a spot on Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, where they'd rented a cottage for the week. Cayuga juts northward from Ithaca and goes for 40 miles. The cottage had a lovely little yard that ran right down to a dock, where Rusty had a small sailboat. The weather was at least 10 degrees cooler and lots less humid than the city had been.

It's kind of odd to hang out with people you've heard about for years but never met - you know things about them -- some things that are maybe not so positive -- that you can't mention. So there's a strange sort of dissonance. They turned out to be very nice people, quite hospitable and fun to hang out with. They were the people I had heard about in some ways, but not in others. As much as we talk about our families to our friends, we can't really convey the absolute truth about them, because there is no absolute truth - just our experiences and peculiar biases and conflicted feelings about the people we love.

So, Susanne, thanks for the pleasure of your company on Cayuga Lake - and for the experience of meeting your family - not so different from my family, after all.

Switch gears now, to the trips up and back. I took the Greyhound, and I honestly don't think I've been on a Greyhound since taking a trip to Port Angeles sometime back in the '80s, before Sophie was born. This was also my first trip upstate since moving here.

The trip north was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that the bus driver at the Port Authority (the infamous Port Authority) had some sort of system for seating his passengers that he couldn't explain very clearly. Some seats were "reserved" but not really, so people would sit in them and then he would make them move, get off the bus, let more people on, and then make another group of transgressors move. Then suddenly, all bets were off and those seats were open to anyone. Before we got on the road, he announced over the mike that he wanted us to know he wasn't showing any bias towards any individual or group - just following some arcane Greyhound rules. But to my ear, he sounded like the Emperor of the Bus, a petty tyrant with a tiny, mobile kingdom all his own. Not a bad guy, but definitely happy to be In Charge.

My fellow passengers made up a sort of low-rent UN - there must have a dozen nationalities represented, and several entire families with kids, aunts, uncles, grandparents, many with Canada as their ultimate destination - 12 or 13 hours on the bus. (My trip was only about 5 hours.)

I got off in Binghamton and tranferred to a Shortline Bus for the last leg to Ithaca. The bus station was stuck in the '70s - see the yellow plastic chairs in the picture -- and in some lonely corner of Lost America. It was nice to get back on the bus again and cruise through the low, green Adirondacks towards Ithaca.

After three days in Ithaca and environs, I was back on the bus. This time, it was a different cast and crew. The conversation between the two guys behind me quickly drifted to drugs. The older of the two - he later said he was 40 - was full of advice for his young seatmate, who was maybe 18 or 19. The relative merits of Perc and Oxy, Beck's and PBR, the cost effectiveness of buying a kilo of coke for $8K, splitting it into 8-balls, and selling them for $100-$150 each. By Mr. Big's calculations, you could turn the $8K investment into $25K.

"I get everything wholesale. I buy two kilos, keep one for myself and sell the other." By now, Mr. B was clearly enjoying his role as teacher to The Kid. I had the impression they had just met on the bus. The younger guy said he had been visiting family upstate and was heading back home to Florida (another unbelieveably long bus ride . . .). Mr. Big assessed the status of Utica and Ithaca as drug markets and came down on the side of Utica. He bragged about having fought the police when he was arrested at some point in the past - his punishment for resisting, he said, was that they confiscated his expensive sneakers. He told his stories in a raspy, supremely confident New Yorkese. He was from the Bronx.

Pretty soon, a sale was made and the Kid took his pills and drifted off to sleep. (I didn't see any of this, mind you - just overheard it.)

Mr. Big also had an appreciation for good cheese. "Once, I went on this trip to this place where there was nothing but Amish. They make this cheese, man, and it is SO soft. They send their guys to the city and they don't even know what they're doing. They look like f--king Jews."

The conversation shifts to tourism as we near the city. Two women on the bus mention that they've never been to New York - they're looking out the windows for the skyline and keep mistaking Jersey cities for NYC. Mr. Big explained that there were certain places they should avoid but he wouldn't be more specific than "parts of Chinatown at night" or certain areas around Times Square. They said they'd heard the Bronx was bad, but he demurred. "It used to be," he said, "but now you go to the Bronx and you think you're in Queens, it's so pretty. They got cul de sacs and everything."

Welcome home.

(more pics here)

My favorite lesbians

I went with Sophie and Melissa to the NYC Pride parade last weekend - it was an especially auspicious year for this celebration because it was the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Seeing the veterans of Stonewall riding by on a float was at once heartening and sad. Many are now old men, and they still can't legally marry or live entirely free of fear that they could be the victims of anti-gay violence - even on some of the streets of liberal New York.

I imagine their stories are hard for people of Melissa and Sophie's generation to grasp, though they and the other younger people in the crowd absolutely recognize the contribution of these gay elders and they cheered them as they went by - they are heroes to all of their gay "children" and "grandchildren." And to people like me as well - parents of young men and women who are just trying to get on in the world and live their lives as free Americans. Stonewall is Selma.

This week's New Yorker quoted an article called "The Homosexual in America" that was published in 1966 in Time magazine: "[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness."

Back in those days, when I was in high school, I read Time voraciously. It was a sort of pop culture Bible to a certain people of my generation, and I am horrified to think that I was reading that sort of crap.

Times change, but not that much in some ways. I will never forget stopping with Sophie in Laramie, Wyoming, when we drove cross-country from Seattle to Poughkeepsie in 2003. It was just a few years after the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, and we pulled over to take some pictures of one of those lonesome stretches of fence that go for on for miles in that part of the west. Suddenly, Sophie started to cry -- and I knew right away what she was thinking. This was much like the spot where Matthew had been tied to a fence, beaten, and left to die. We both realized the horrifying implication -- that you could be targeted for violence simply because you were gay, plain and simple.

Now, 40 years after Stonewall and 11 years after Matthew Shepard, a parade seems a slight way to recognize the veterans of the struggle. But it does provide a moment of solidarity, and a chance to remind people of the gay rights issues that are critically important right now -- the fight for marriage equality and the struggle to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't ask, don't tell.

Bare butts and drag may seem frivolous, but in a way that's what it's all about - the freedom to pursue your own happiness. See more pictures here.

Bridge and tunnel geek

The description of the walk pretty much revealed the leader, Craig's, proclivities:

RETRACTILE BRIDGES OF NYC (DUTCH KILLS to GOWANUS CANAL). Around 12-14 flat miles mostly on city streets (residential and industrial). Two of four extant retractile bridges in the US are in NYC. Visit both, and stuff in between including the Newtown Creek Nature Walk and sites in Greenpoint, Willamsburg, etc.

Craig was full of lore and could whip up a sidebar of fascinating facts at the drop of a question. Really, all you had to say was "What's that?" and he would expound on its wonders - one of the few remaining bridges if its type, a rare example of a steel frame freeway superstructure, one of 500 churches built all along the eastern seaboard by an undistinquished but prolific Irish immigrant, and then those retractile bridges.

He was a geeky guy, with glasses, late fifties, kind of overweight and sloppily dressed - someone who looked totally unfit but could walk with incredible energy and bounce. He'd get so excited when he talked that he'd spit. He was a retired R&D guy for Unilever, so he's got all this pent-up energy to do the things he couldn't do when he was working. He was planning more walks as we went - apartment buildings in Greenpoint, churches by that Irish guy, etc.

On this walk, I learned that retractile bridges roll back on tracks, like railroad tracks, usually over a patch of land the same shape as the retracting section of bridge. The one we saw was the Borden Avenue Bridge in Long Island City. We didn't make it to the Carroll Street bridge because of rain, but we did walk about 8 miles through LIC, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, sticking to the industrial streets and sights most of the way. It's a view of New York that you don't get from tourist buses.

If you're a visitor to the city and you're headed for Long Island City, you're most likely going to PS 1, the old public school that's now a satellite of MOMA. You head to Willamsburg for the hipster/arty ambiance - or to Greenpoint for the old-school Polish restaurants and shops (as well as for the new-school hipsterism that has invaded from neighboring Billyburg).

So Craig's view of the world of old Queens and Brooklyn was a revelation, an exercise in delighting in the workaday, the spine and bones of the city, not the gloss and glam.

Which is not to say there wasn't glory to be seen on our walk. The views from of Manhattan from LIC encompassed the Chrysler Building, the UN and the Empire State Building -- all in one grand swatch. And the buildings and structures Craig pointed out with unmitigated enthusiasm for the industrial past and present were also glorious - that they actually got built was a marvel in some cases, but in many instances, they were spectacularly beautiful as well as practical: A majestic art deco monolith that served as an air exchange center for subways, a wastewater treatment plant that looked like a collection of massive onion domes, a block-sized brick apartment building called The Astral that was built by Charles Pratt for his workers at the Astral Oil Company, the last patch of sidewalk in New York made of wooden pavers, the original home of the Everhard Faber pencil company, complete with terra cotta pencils decorating the top.

Altogether a great way to spend a rainy Saturday - with a guy who loves New York and wants you to know all about it.

Found on the street

Sometimes things just present themselves to you for inspection and evaluation. On a walk around the neighborhood in search of a some cottages that someone had told me about, I happened upon a pair of brown duck shoes abandoned on the sidewalk. You can see them here - just left on the street as if someone had slipped out of them for a minute to take a shower or to give his feet a breather.

There's so much stuff on the streets here - the usual newspapers and coffee cups tossed aside or blown out of overfilled trash cans, but also boxes of books, furniture, kitchen utensils, window screens - you name it, it's there to be taken. And usually it is. Come back five minutes later and it's as though vultures have descended and plucked the roadkill from the pavement.

The duck shoes seemed odd to me because, first of all, it was a pair, and abandoned shoes are usually singles. It reminded me of those pairs of shoes you see all around Seattle hanging from telephone wires or trees, deliberately tossed up in the air and across the wires, and said to indicate drug dealers' trading locales - though this could be an urban myth. (Here, the parallel is plastic bags in trees - if these plastic bags were swine flu, it'd be an epidemic.)

A few blocks past the duck shoes, I came upon a stoop sale where there was another pair of shoes, this one a kind of objet trouvé in the artlessness of its placement. Vintage but perfectly pristine white baby shoes sat atop an old school desk that someone had decoupaged in maps. The shoes appear oversized in this context, dwarfing the "world" they stand on. But their delicacy evokes a lost world of babyhood that certainly no longer exists in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, or anywhere else that I know of - baby's first shoes are more likely Nikes than stiff white leather hightops. And they were being sold as a bit of arcana, not as something real, whereas the duck shoes were actually functional footwear.

Later, with some Seattle friends in Times Square, the conversation turned to shoes as we watched the ladies of the evening parade around in 5-inch platforms and stilettos, wondering how they could navigate the streets of the city shod this way - or for that matter, how other women around us could make it around so easily in flip-flops. Neither option seemed to fit the city, but both also seemed perfect somehow. Either way, these women were working it in Times Square, and there's something to be said for standing on your own two feet, no matter what you're wearing.

Baby, you can drive my car

Walking back from the movies tonight (Up -see it!), I was thinking about how much I like to walk here. Sure, it's not always ideal - when the weather's bad, I have little choice about how to get to work - I could take a cab, but that seems indulgent, and to take the bus or subway would mean walking almost as far as I have to walk to get to work. So hoofing it there just seems right.

Walking is certainly not the same here as in Seattle. For one, it feels safer to walk here at night. I wouldn't really have set out on foot alone in my neighborhood there after dark - there was no one on the street. Here, however, there's always someone around.

I'm not naive enough to think this makes it perfectly safe - after all, just because people are out and about doesn't mean they have your best interests at heart. But for the most part, they're just making their way home or wherever - just like you are - schlepping their stuff and moving forward.

What's interesting too is the way people here overestimate the distance between point A and point B. I could walk from my house through Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, around the edge of Prospect Park and all the way to Kensington, where Sophie and Melissa live, in about an hour. This is the same amount of time it would have taken me to walk from the Pine Street Cottages to the heart of Queen Anne. Yet here, the neighborhoods are thought of as so distinct that it's like you're crossing borders into foreign countries.

Because I'm still getting to know the area, I'm still sometimes startled to turn a corner and realize I'm somewhere I've been before, but that I'd never arrived from quite that angle. So much to see, so much to miss - and really no way to see it properly except on foot.

Oh, sure, you'd see it differently driving or from a penthouse somewhere, but the concrete and slate that make up the sidewalks here have survived the pounding of millions of feet over decades and decades - and yet they still move you forward along a path you may or may not have chosen.

I don't miss my car at all. It gave me a certain freedom, but it was also a burden. With walking, the biggest burdens are that your feet get tired or your shoes don't fit right or you can't buy the extra-colossal container of laundry soap. But you see so much more.

Rhythm of the city

I hear the R train rumbling deep beneath my apartment - not loud but a deep and consonant presence, reassuring in its regularity, like an earth mother.

That's one of the sounds that I associate with my new life in a city that thrums with noise. I'm not the first to observe this, of course. The poet Federico Garcia Lorca said that "New York is Senegal with machines," which just about sums it up on some days.

Outside as I write this, a siren is "burping" - squealing in short bursts in a frustrating attempt to get vehicles to move out of the way, which they will - eventually. That's another part of the rhythm of the city.

On my way to the Y tonight, I walked past a street that the police had blocked off, thinking maybe there was a domestic dispute in progress or something like that. I got a few blocks further and realized that it wasn't just that street but a large area cordoned off by the police. In Seattle, if something like this had been going on, you could stop and ask bystanders what was happening and they usually wouldn't know. No one had thought to ask the cops. But here, I asked a woman and she already had the whole story - suspicious package, the bomb squad was poking around trying to figure out what it was, no big deal.

By the time I left the Y, the excitement was over and the streets were back to their normal rock and roll: Cars moving in that peculiar speed-up-slow down pattern that always reminds me of something David Letterman says - "Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines."

Back at home, I hear another rhythm - the murmuring of people walking by my windows on their way to here and there, all part of the flow. I like that sound because it's the sound of life going along, moving with the pace of time.

Just another emigre in Brooklyn

I went to a reading the other night for an Irish writer, Colm Toibin, at BookCourt, my favorite neighborhood bookstore (they have a different writer practically every night). His new book is called Brooklyn, and it's about a young woman who comes to Brooklyn from County Wexford in the 1950s. I've just started reading the book, so I can't give you a review. And I've never read anything else by Tiobin.

But what interested me in this book and reading was an article in the NY Times about Tiobin and his take on Brooklyn and Irish immigration.

As a double emigre myself (from Kentucky to Seattle and from Seattle to New York), I can relate. And as a third generation descendent of an Irish immigrant (my maternal great-grandmother), I'm always interested in most anything Irish.

But Toibin talked about something I'd never heard of, a phenomenon in Ireland called the American wake. What that means is the family get-together right before someone heads off for America. It's been such a common occurence over the decades because there have been succeeding waves of immigrants from Ireland, forced by economic circumstances to go -- and possibly never return.

This was the case for my great-grandmother, who came to America (via New Orleans) as a 9-year-old. The two salient facts about her, according to what I heard my mother say many times, were that she never had any contact with her family in County Kilkenny again, and that she always looked sad - indeed, I have a picture of her that is the essence of sadness.

In the 1950s, when Toibin's main character came here, at least there was the possibility of writing letters, even making phone calls. The huge numbers of Irish people who came here in the 1980s could fly back home more easily, and now cell phones and the Internet mean that almost constant communication is possible.

But emigres are always at a loss in a certain way, even if they can talk to those back home or visit often. I think you pick up the spirit of the places you live in - good, bad or indifferent -- and carry that with you wherever you go.

I'm a little Louisville, a little Seattle, and maybe I'm becoming a little Brooklyn, who knows?

I'm not even sure what that means. But the guy at the Korean grocer's where I buy fruit actually wished me a good evening tonight and smiled, which he's never done before. And tourists stop me on the street and ask me where Grimaldi's is or how to find the Brooklyn Bridge -- as though I look like I would know. And I do.

Behind in my work

I've renewed a promise to myself to write a new entry at least once a week. So here goes.

It was great seeing all of you in Seattle, where the weather was wonderful and the company even better. Thanks, Susan and Tom and Mary, for making room for me in the middle of your busy weekend. And thanks to the rest of you for doing your usual best to put together an impromptu party with fabulous snacks.

Here in NYC, we're having Seattle weather - rain, rain, rain. Lucky for them, Sophie and Melissa are in Puerto Rico and missing the precip. Specifically, they're on the Isla de Vieques, where the horses run wild and the water in a certain bay is luminescent.

On Saturday, I went on a garden tour of the Lower East Side. The area we were in is also called Loisaida (pictures here), a word that even appears on street signs as an alternative name for Avenue C. It comes from casual use but also from a 1974 poem by the Nuyorican poet Bittman Rivas. Over the decades, the Lower East Side has changed from Jewish working class to Latino and Puerto Rican to hipster - and it's still changing.

I went there with a walking group called the Outdoors Club - I've done several walks with them, and this was by far the most interesting, culturally speaking. The gardens we visited were mostly community gardens and of wide variety - some purely floral, some with hardscape built by hand, many with found-object decoration. One was filled with stuffed animals and toy robots. These things hung from trees and walls and popped up out of the ground like little buried treasures.

The best was more like a wild prarie field, filled with grass and sculpture. The Kenkelaba Sculpture Garden was a on a lot between two buildings that the community fought fiercely to keep from development when an old building was torn down by the city -- the same was true of many of the other gardens spaces.

The Kenkelaba garden was next to an an apartment building that's run as an artists' coop. Across the street was a gallery owned and run by the guy who owns the apartment building. He came out to talk with us and show us around his gallery, where he has pieces by most of the major African American artists of the last half century -- Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, even Muhammed Ali. A tiny little place filled with treasures, plus a back garden full of chairs made of tools, computers, jerrycans, just about anything you can imagine.

The day ended with a visit to the central courtyard of Stuyvesant Town, a planned community built by Met Life after World War II - very much like the place where Susanne grew up, Parkchester in the Bronx, where affordable housing was made available to veterans, teachers, and other middle-class workers. Stuyvesant Town was recently sold to a corporation and now apartments are being rented at market rates, much to the dismay of the people who live there. Their rents won't go up - it's rent-controlled - but a woman on the tour who lives there said that the new owners have set up a class system, where new tenants can use certain facilities that are no longer open to old-time residents. There's now a private library and a private bar/cafe. Seems like there's a lot of resentment building.

Despite that, the central garden of Stuyvesant Town is lovely -- mature trees, a huge fountain, lots of lawn and park benches. An idyll in the middle of the city.

But in New York, nothing is an idyll for long . . .

A moment of Zen

That's what Jon Stewart calls the little fillip at the end of The Daily Show. For me, in New York, there are a lot of moments of Zen, mostly having to do with suddenly seeing the city from an odd angle, or unexpectedly coming upon a place I've heard about but never seen. And a lot of these moments are about seeing the Empire State Building from every which way - sometimes it looks small and distant and it's hard to believe it's the tallest building in the city.

Other times, it's right there in front of you, looming in such a way that you can't really even see the top of it. If you're literally in front of it, you're aware of its presence as a monument (a weak word to describe it), an icon, a surreal thing that is in reality just another building. You notice it more at the level because of the crowds that are always swarming around it.

Sometimes, for me, it's like a lighthouse: I can tell that I'm heading in the right direction because I can see it - there it is, so I'm know I'm heading north or south or east or west. A quotidian thing, useful and amazing at the same time.

On occasion, I've been walking somewhere in Manhattan and I'll realize that a little clutch of people are looking up at something, transfixed, and when I follow their gaze they're almost invariably looking at it. It's a religious experience, like when the sun and clouds accumulate in a certain way and you can see the luminous rays falling to earth - I always call that phenomenon God light, a strange thing for a non-spiritual person like myself.

There are certain things that define a city, and it's almost silly to say it, but the Empire State Building IS New York in some fundamental way - like the subway and the Met and Battery Park, only so, so much more so.

Sometimes I look at the Empire State Building and I get a little shiver of fear that something terrible could happen to it like what happened to the Twin Towers. But then it just seems so singular and strong and tall that the fear goes away and the awe sets in again. It's just a building, but oh, what a building.

(A note about the picture: I took it one night while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, so it encompasses three monumental structures: the Empire State, the Manhattan Bridge and the BB.)

East River interlude

This past week was a busy one at work, not least because I spent a day in Washington DC at the office there. It was a quick trip - down on the train on Wednesday morning and back that same night. One of those business trips that seems useful but in retrospect dealing with something that could have been hashed out in a good conference call. The good thing was that my coworker and I got a chance to walk down to the Tidal Basin and see the cherry blossoms - lovely, even in a misty rain.

Today, I took a walk with a group called the Outdoors Club along the path by the East River. We started at 34th St and walked to South Street Seaport, after which I caught the nearby Ikea ferry (free!) back to Brooklyn. It was a lovely day, clear and in the mid-60s. The walk was notable for the views of Brooklyn, but I don't think it would become one of my favorites because it skirts the East Side Highway and was really noisy.

It was an interesting group of mostly older people from the city and as far away as Poughkeepsie. Some of them have been walking with this group for 30 years or more. I loved hearing one woman's stories about growing up on the Lower East Side before it was chi-chi, and as a working single mom. Her name was Shirley and she lives in Chelsea. I would guess she's in her mid-70s. Shirley was very short, like many New Yorkers (I remember Mary B remarking once that there were a lot more short people in NYC than in Seattle - who knows why? Genetics?). She had a lot of opinions about recent immigrants to New York, some not so positive, and about working moms who leave their kids with these immigrants while they work. Interesting in that she herself was the child of immigrants from the Ukraine and Hungary. "In those days," she said, "Mothers didn't work and they made do."

Another woman, Eileen, came in from Long Island, where she lives with her third "husband" - they're not married but have been together 20 years. "You don't make that mistake three times," she said. But her two husbands before that both died of illness, and her current one is going blind, so she has to take care of him. Thus, she hikes to have a respite from being a caregiver. She was also a first generation child of immigrants, from Ireland. But she had a more tolerant attitude towards the newer immigrants, seeing them as being like her parents - hard working and looking for something better. She very sweetly took me in hand when she learned I was new to the city.

What's interesting in situations like this is that people often ask me where I'm from, a question that I could confidently answer in Seattle - Kentucky. But here it's a bit harder. I am from Kentucky, but I'm also from Seattle, having spent equal and more recent time there. The next question I'm asked is unanswerable for me at the moment: How long do you think you'll stay in New York? After all, I've been here only three months - barely the length of a season.

For this post, I'm including some pictures of what I think of as Dickensian New York. You see these strange things here that are so retrograde, like the guy heating up a bucket of patching tar with a blow torch right on the street, and those weird pipes that seem to be vents for some kind of underworld. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for them, but I just don't know what it is yet.

And finally, a picture of a message written in chalk at a house down the street a few days ago.

Rose

Nona and Bob and George and Martha and Abe and Barack

Hi everyone,

What a nice weekend I had in DC last week chez Nona and Bob. Their place is so sweet, and they're so hospitable that every time I've stayed there I've felt like इ was registered in a luxury hotel. Try it sometime - you'll like it.

And speaking of luxury, Mt. Vernon, where the three of us went on Sunday has to be one of the most architecturally sophisticated and beautiful historic homes I've ever seen. It was a lovely, sunny, cool day when we there, and the grounds of Mt. Vernon had a nice early spring glow. The house itself is amazing - all red-roofed, rusticated elegance, exactly the kind of home you would imagine a successful 18th century farmer would have. The location atop a hill overlooking the Potomac is breathtakingly perfect, especially the river view from the porch that runs the length of the house. George and Martha had style - most evident in their gorgeous bedroom, which is the most simple and elegant room in the house. Some of the others are painted in a rather garish green - but this bedroom is white and the most soothing palest blue-green.

Even the loud cell-phone talker we had to endure in the line couldn't spoil the experience. Check it out in the Flash presentation on this page.

On Saturday Nona and I spent several hours touring the National Portrait Gallery, another gorgeous building that has been painstakingly renovated in recent years.

There are so many stunning portraits in the gallery that I can only mention a couple. As I write this, I realize that it was sort of a presidential weekend, which I suppose is not that unusual an experience when you're visiting DC. Nonetheless, it was awesome to see photographs of Abe Lincoln just down the hall from the iconic photo collage of Barack Obama. These two presidents in particular belong together. (Abe was photographed many, many times - he was apparently fascinated with the form and invited photographers into his world.)

Another revelation in the gallery were the photographic jewelry pieces, mostly from the 19th century - exquisite little mementos of people who had died, or simply tokens of affections.

And yet another wonderful thing about this trip was the discovery of a cheap but nice bus service that goes to DC (and Boston) - I'll be using Vamoose and Bolt buses from now on. (Take note, Ann and Nona! )

A New York story - the neighbor I never met

I went upstairs to collect my mail today and there in the doorway was a bunch of yellow roses with a note saying "For James Purdy." I looked on the tenant list and there was a Purdy, but that told me little. So I went to the Times web site and searched his name and found this obituary:

James Purdy was a novelist and playwright, and he had broken his hip sometime in the past few months or weeks and was in a nursing home in New Jersey when he died, at 94.

The Times said: "Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes."

He was a pal of Paul Bowles and Dorothy Parker, who apparently made his reputation among writers with a review of his first book, "Malcolm," in Esquire. He never became a mainstream writer, though, and apparently was at peace with that on some level. He told an interviewer a few years ago, “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me. I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

I feel an obligation now to track down his books and read them. Anyone know anything about him?

A walk on Staten Island and a bit of art

I feel like time passes so quickly here - maybe because I'm working later and there's less time left in the evenings to get everything done. I'm really not sure. But in any case, I'm just now writing a bit about what I did last weekend - and it seems eons ago.

On Saturday, I took the train to the Upper East Side to see two museum shows, one at the Met and one at the Jewish Museum. The show at the JM was about Yiddish/Jewish theater in Moscow in the 1920s, when Marc Chagall was still living there and designing sets. The canvas banners he painted as backdrops for a show at one of the theaters had been rolled up and stored in the theater’s cellar for decades – through the worst of times in Russia – and were then rediscovered. It was amazing being in the gallery surrounded by these immense Chagall paintings filled with floating people, animals, food, etc. – experiencing them in the same way as the Russians who had attended the theater for which they were painted. Chagall signed some of them in Russian script and others in French.

The Met had a really great show of pictures by Pierre Bonnard – a painter I knew little about but had always lumped together with the Impressionists and thought of as a still life painter – pretty bowls of fruit and vases of flowers. Boy, was I wrong.

These paintings were all done when he was older and all are of domestic scenes. But the more you look at them the more you realize these are not pretty pictures. Bonnard’s wife, Marthe, is often a ghostly presence on the edge of the scene, or an unhappy lump sitting at a food-filled table. She’s almost not there. In one heart-rending painting, he shows her pushed out to the corner of the frame, looking towards a smiling young woman. The young woman is Bonnard’s long-dead mistress, who had committed suicide years before when she learned he was marrying another woman. But the real specter in the picture is his living wife.
I hope this makes some sense. Here’s the picture so you can see what I mean. All of the paintings share the very tight framing that this one has. The colors are gorgeous but the people and objects seemed trapped or locked in. Great show.

Sunday marked my first excursion to Staten Island, for a 7-mile walk with a group called Shorewalkers. It was a warm, overcast day – so perfect for walking. I’m beginning to thing you can’t leave the house here without running into a writer. One of my fellow hikers was Gloria Naylor, who won a National Book Award in the 1980s for a book called The Women of Brewster Place (Oprah was in a movie made from the book). I would not have recognized Naylor, but someone else pointed her out, saying, “She says she writes books. Her name is Gloria something.” Look her up on Wikipedia – interesting story.

The hike was great, especially as a way to get a little bit of geographic orientation, and the free Staten Island Ferry takes you by the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Best freebie in NYC. I’m told that it’s especially great at sunset – and it’s one subway stop from my house.

Shorewalkers does an annual walk around the entire island of Manhattan – 32 miles, 14 hours. Anyone want to join me?

New York is liberal, right?

More to report, so I'm actually doing another blog today. This one's about a protest I stumbled upon at City Hall in Lower Manhattan yesterday.

Yes, it was an anti-Obama rally, and people in attendance seemed most upset at what they see as his Red tendencies.

I felt as if I had landed on another planet - read the signs and you'll see what I mean.

After Bobby Jindal's strange rant the other night, I can't help but feel that the fringe is growing larger and more desperate as the days go by.

And these protesters looked to be working class people, not Wall Street fat cats (with Wall St just equally desperate blocks away, you couldn't help but think about it while watching the rally).

One last image to sum up the day - No Socialism! Gotta love America.

Signs of the times

Sorry, folks, I'm an inconsistent diarist, partly because my home laptop died and I've just now gotten a new one. So I'm writing to you on my new red Dell XPS M1330 at a Starbucks on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights - just doing my part to keep the economy moving.

Interesting thing about this nabe for a Seattleite is that there are very few places where you can find wi-fi connections. Two that I know of, and Starbucks requires a sub with ATT or - and this is a great loophole -- you have to buy a coffee card (even a $5 one will do) and you get two free hours of wi-fi per day as long as you use or refill the coffee card once a month. (Suzanne, take that laptop out for some air using this consumer tip from Rose.)

The headline on this post refers to signs I've seen and photographed around BK and Manhattan. The first one is from a bank in the neighborhood - a broken sign that kind of sums up the world of banking as many people see it these days. No aspersions cast on TD Bank - I'm sure they're perfectly respectable.

I heard from someone who works there that even American Express is getting bank bailout money. Odd.

The second picture is not really of a sign, but the sight of this Warholian sized soup can sitting out on Henry Street for trash pick-up certainly stopped me in my tracks on the way to work. It was in front of a church, and it's chicken noodle, for those of you searching for clues about it provenance.

The snow in the picture reminds me - that was from the last snowstorm of a month or so ago. There's another one on the way, with potential accumulation of 10 inches or so - though I doubt that will happen in the city.

In a while, I'm off to see Two Lovers, which takes place in BK but was filmed in New Jersey. So many illusions in life, as well as in the movies, including Joaquin Phoenix's recent odd behavior. My celeb following friends will know what I'm talking about.

Went for a walk yesterday across the Brooklyn Bridge - my third or fourth time doing that over the years. It never fails to amaze me. And it also surprises me every morning when I see it as I walk to work. Who would have thought a year ago I'd be living within walking distance of the Brooklyn Bridge?

Rose

Diana, the paparazzi, and me

Hello,

I know this is silly, but it was kind of exciting yesterday to see not one, not two, but three celebrities and semi-celebrities in one day. The first was Christine Baranski - some of you may know her from Mamma Mia or from the old "Cybill" sitcom in which she played Cybill Shepherd's best friend. Christine and her husband were in line behind me at the movies - I was at the Paris Theater, the one right next to the Plaza Hotel, to see The Reader (really great, BTW). I chatted a bit with Christine and hubbie, who is also an actor, Matthew Cowles (soap-opera star).

Then as I was making my way downtown after the movie - a gorgeous sunny day, albeit a bit chilly - I was walking by Bryant Park when I realized it was Fashion Week. So I stopped near the entrance to one of the tents, where there was a flock of paparazzi. I joined the little crowd there just in time to see Julia Stiles come out of the tent and then, a few minutes later, Diana Ross, looking kinda fake and fabulous, but with incredible bearing. She didn't bat an eye or turn to pose as the paps yelled at her - the woman knows what becomes a legend most, as they used to say in the Blackglama ads.

Today, it was back to normal life, with a trip to Ikea to find some shelving. No paparazzi there, but the great thing is, all I have to do to get there is walk three blocks from my house and take a free shuttle. They also have a free ferry for people coming from Manhattan.

Make a comment, send an email, give a call - let me know what you're up to.

Dumbo and the two bridges

This is going to be a photo blog, and since bridges are dominant the view in my neighborhood, I'll show you what they look like from my office. I took this from a window in my office building.

Looking south you can see the Brooklyn Bridge very clearly every day. On this particular day it was snowing in that way in which the snow seems to be coming from every direction at once - even from the ground up. I thought it was a kind of Monet-like scene.

There something magical and solid at the same time about the B Bridge. It seems amazing that it's a real bridge, with traffic and people walking on it - very lovely but also utilitarian.

From the other side of my office building, looking north, you can see the Manhattan Bridge, after which Dumbo (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is named.

Rumor has it that the artists who initially moved into Dumbo, when it was cheap and dangerous, gave it that name because they thought it would discourage others from moving in. Didn't work. Now it's chic and expensive, despite the fact the trains rumble overhead on the Manhattan Bridge making mega-decibel noise.

Here's the Manhattan Bridge, in the same snow storm. Painted blue, with little curlicues and fancy finials at the top, it's frillier looking than the B Bridge - but it's a tough old broad as well, enduring year after year of train and car traffic.

More later - gotta go to bed.

Glorious day in Brooklyn

The weather here was lovely - too bad I spent most of the day inside.

A couple of you asked me if I felt safe here, and I want to assure you that I do. Brooklyn Heights, where I live, is a nice nabe where there are always lots of people on streets. Maybe I'm suffering from newcomer's naivete, but I think NY in general is pretty safe. Mind you, there are certain places I wouldn't go alone late at night, but that was true in Seattle too.

Another question, asked by Lani: What is Dumbo? It stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, and it's and area that's actually between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. I'll post some pictures of both soon and let you know where you can see them.

OK, so it's February already

Hi everyone,

I have now been in Brooklyn, in my new home, for a little over a month. In that month, we've inaugurated a new president and the country has lost several million more jobs. On both counts, I feel very lucky. I get to say "President Obama" instead of "President Bush," and I have job - a good job - when lots of people have lost theirs. In fact, my company just cut more than 20 positions - the first time they've ever done that.

So I'm trying to put work in perspective, which hasn't been easy because of the way it has consumed my time since I've been here. And now, as a result of the layoffs, I'll be taking on some of the duties of one of the people who left.

But enough about work. I've also been trying to get out and about as much as possible, with the couple of going to at least one museum or gallery every week, as well as to some sort of cultural event or new neighborhood. Because my office is in Dumbo, it's pretty easy to reach the gallery goal - there are many nearby. On Thursday night, I left work, turned the corner and walked a half block to meet up with Sophie at a gallery opening. She and her friend Lizzie (also a Seattle ex-pat) have an assignment to write and photograph a guy who was showing his photographs of eagle handlers in Mongolia. So we went to the opening of his show, and then to a bunch of other gallery openings in the same building.

The photos of the Mongolians were magnificent large-format black and whites of these beautiful people who looked like Native Americans, Chinese and Slavs all at the same time. Really gorgeous. Down the hall was a set of about 40 Vietnam war photos by Eddie Adams - I'm sure a lot of you recall his pics. The most famous was the one of the South Viet soldier shooting a prisoner in the street in Saigon. The Adams photos were journalistic and grainy and just as gorgeous in their way as those of the Mongolians.

But my favorite show of the evening was altogether different. A British photographer, Helen Sear, does these amazing photo collages of the backs of women's heads that appear to be shot through reflective glass and a scrim of netting that looks like old-fashioned hat veiling. Check them out online - not the same as seeing them in person. I also spent next month's rent on one.

Speaking of renter, I finally found a renter, a post-doctoral student in biology at the UW who just moved up from the Bay Area. I had a sudden flood of eager, qualified potential renters, so I guess the thaw finally broke. Such a relief.

Movies: just saw Frost/Nixon - Frank Langella is indeed amazing as Nixon, as was the actor who played Frost, Michael Sheen. But I must confess that I find Sheen's physical appearance distracting in the same way I did when he played Tony Blair in Queen. Something about his weird, upturned nose - plus, he's not nearly the hunk he needs to be to play either of those sexy, smart men.

Also saw Rachel's wedding - interesting style, interesting acting, but too much of Anne Hathaway chewing the scenery for my taste. Everyone else is subtle and a little odd in a good way.

Sorry - too late in the evening for very insightful movie reviewing.

Let me know what you're up to. Promise to keep this updated more often.

Rose