Category: En route

Saturday, sort of

Time’s James Poniewozik has this thing about bringing out Robo-James while he’s on his vacations (Robo-James being just a bunch of automated postings to his blog, pre-fabricated before Poniewozik would leave his desk at Time). So, in honor of Robo-James, this post was done before I got out of town, and if this works, will be posted sometime Saturday, since I’m not sure I’ll be blogging this weekend. Oh, let’s just do this for the heck of it! [edit — umm, pre-programmed posting didn’t quite work, but I tried…]

NY Times’ David W. Dunlap, waxing poetic in the City Room blog on how the FDR Drive gave him shade, or as he put it: “a little bit of shade on a summer morning is all a reporter needs to forget momentarily that he’s on assignment.” Hmm, you can’t possibly forget that you’re at work, can you? Hmm! (actually, he gave some substantive comparative sense of how people hate having highways block the waterfront, as seen in the examples of Boston and San Francisco).

NY Times’ Sewell Chan on a new book on the Woolworth Building.

NY Times’ Sam Roberts on how he touched off nerves with his article on when the heck was NYC actually founded; some good stuff here.

NY Times’ Jim Dwyer on the temptation to jump into the subway tracks to get his fallen notebook; does he do it? Good story! (it wasn’t that long ago that I watched this nutty lady make the quick jump to grab her fallen cell phone; some nice guy helped pull her back up; she was just lucky the train didn’t come for several minutes yet and that her phone was that close to get).

An only in NYC thing: last weekend, when I was in the Time-Warner building at Columbus Circle, this guy somehow walked straight into the women’s restroom, where there were women looking at him like he was a nut. However, he continued to speak into his cell phone in brisk Spanish, and blithely didn’t seem to realize where he was, completely ignoring the International Symbol for Women’s Restroom on the door. He wasn’t even dressed like a woman, wearing a baseball cap and baggy jeans and all. Yeesh!

Watched Eureka on SciFi this week; good stuff! Its newest summer season starts next week.

So, by the time this gets posted, I’m probably still on the road. Oh well.

Cultural Tofu

SSW mentioned the ongoing Asian American International Film Festival that we both attended, and so far has been summarized by the panel that we attended on Saturday about Asian American Aesthetics. My witty quip summarizing the panelists, which included thespian David Henry Hwang and director Wayne Wang, was “cultural tofu” – kind of amorphous, absorbs surrounding flavors, is “value added” (or what we would call in a different decade, “hamburger helper“). Like tofu, artistes strive for something unmistakenly Asian or subdue it to be almost invisible. Do other cultures run into this phenomenon?

I felt that way representing the “Hong Kong” team at the 72 Hour Shootout competition.  I’m familiar enough with Hong Kong that I can name everywhere that we (actually they of Hong Kong – I just took care of the delivery part at the end, and other than the team leader, I had not met anyone) filmed in the movie, but am I part of that aestetic? Is belonging a necessary function to adopting an aestetic? We didn’t win, but we were unique as the first ever entry shot in Asia, and I had plenty of people ask how we pulled off getting the film back to New York in time. We’re going to have to top this next year – how remains to be seen.