All posts by ester

brokers can bite me, funny, houzin, life in new york

Out of House and Home

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Together, Mr. Ben and I have been preparing to embark on the incredible journey of Home Ownership. It is a quintessentially American journey, more American than Route 66 or McDonald’s or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps — at which, by the way, apparently our people take a back seat to the Danes, Swedes, Canadians, and lots of other pinko-commies who have supposedly grown fat and lazy sucking on the government’s teat.

Over the years, we have pinched our pennies until the outline of Lincoln’s hat remained etched on our thumbs, and stretched a dollar til it was so thin you could read through it. Despite bouts of unemployment, Mr. Ben’s law school debt, and the fact that we got engaged and then married, we now have enough money for a down payment. What’s the secret, you ask? Well, for one thing, you let your parents pay for the wedding, even if it means they do everything their way and you get about as much say as the flower girl. For another, you re-use everything. Those sweatpants your mom bought you from the Limited when you were ten? Why *not* wear those to gym? So what if you look like Liz Lemon on an off day?

SIDE NOTE: I love it when people compliment Liz Lemon.

“You’re Liz Lemon, damn it. In certain lights, you’re an 8! Using East Coast, over-35 standards, excluding Miami.” –Jack

“There’s something about you lately. Make me want to put my feet in your mouth.” –Tracy

Um, I’m getting off track. The point is, I’ve been looking at apartments since late summer and discovered, as many good people have before me, that in New York, the definition of “amenities” has been broadened to include many things that residents of other places take for granted, such as “light,” “floorboards,” “non-lead paint,” etc. In order to get a whopping three (3) rooms, plus a kitchen and a bathroom, in a Stuff White People Like neighborhood, you need to produce a huge amount of money, the kind of dough that bought a prize racehorse in the Godfather. 

Poor Khartoum came to a sticky end, as perhaps you recall.

Anyway, we have an accepted offer on our apartment of choice, and it’s all terribly exciting. In honor of this development (and in honor of Filmspotting, which I’ve been listening to regularly now for almost a year), I thought I’d do a Top 5 list of movies about houses, and I’m soliciting suggestions. What are your favorites?

In any such endeavor, rules are crucial:

1) The house must be a character of sorts in the film and not just a backdrop (so, like, the Austen novel Mansfield Park would count, but the Austen novel Emma would not).

2) The hotel in The Shining does not count as a house. Neither does the prison in The Shawshank Redemption. We’re being strict here, people.

3) The action must take place largely in or around the house; the house must be central to the plot and even the identity of the film.

So! Recommendations? Suggestions? Let’s hear ’em.

lefties, life in new york, the jews

Occupy Kol Nidre

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This Friday at 7:00 PM, for the first time, I will join the Occupy Wall Street protesters. In prayer.

Yup! Those over-educated anarchist 99%ers are going to observe the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. They have an objective, which is simple, straightforward, and clear: Put on a Kol Nidre service. Will it be audible? Will it even make sense? I have no idea. Will it be memorable? How could it not be? And that’s what I care about.

A co-worker is considering coming too. I stressed the memorable argument — after all, how many Kol Nidre services will you think back on in your life as distinct, individual events, as opposed to a blurred succession of evenings in shul? But she countered with a question: “Will it be spiritual?”

This is a fair point and it wasn’t anywhere on my list of concerns. I’m not even sure what spiritual means. 13 years of religious school, summers of religious summer camp, thousands of Shabbes dinners, holidays, & bar and bat mitzvahs, a semester of living in Israel, being called “Super Jew” my first year in college until I better learned how to present myself, officially joining a synagogue at 29 with my Jewish husband who I married under a chuppah and everything, and now 2+ years working at a Jewish non-profit — and I still know bupkis about spirituality.

Frankly, I’m okay with that.

My boss bemoaned the fact that her teenage son wasn’t into religion. “Think of it this way,” I told her. “There are only two possibilities for a 16 year old boy: He could either be totally secular, or he could be blowing himself up. So, secular is better.” It made her laugh, and that was part of my intention, but I also kind of meant it. A personal relationship with an entity you conceive of as almighty and infallible and in charge of the universe can be super, in theory. In practice, it tends to make people act in unfortunate ways, like, you know, bringing down the World Trade Center or launching the Crusades.

One of the things I really like about the high holiday liturgy is the emphasis on the community. You didn’t sin this year; we did. So we gather together to ask for forgiveness as a body. After all, maybe you yourself gave blood every month and honored your father and your mother and skipped bacon at brunch. It doesn’t matter much if the guy next to you works as a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. We’re all in it together, communists and capitalists — frankly, Jews have always excelled at being both — and we’re all culpable.

It hasn’t been said much, except probably by people like David Duke: A lot of those people on Wall Street are members of the tribe. There are many more of us, of course, who are merely suffering through the repercussions. Regardless of whether you work for a bank or are still paying off your college loans to one, this is the time to atone, and we should do it publicly. This isn’t about self-hate, or shame; this is merely the time of the year to say “I’m sorry for what we’ve done” and Z Square is the best place to do it.

Good on Occupy Wall Street for setting this up. This is an agenda I can support.

america fuck yeah, books, brooklyn, funny, politix

Close Encounters

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Yesterday, at a party my boss took me to for work, an older gentleman used shaking my hand as an excuse to fondle my wrist. As his index finger caressed my skin and I tried not to barf, I reflected on how many odd face-to-face interactions I have had with people in the last month.

Most recently, I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival, an annual gala where writers and thinkers get to sit in close proximity with the only people who still buy novels. Even when less than scintillating, the panels always give you something to mull over, like when Sigrid Nunez, there to discuss the writing of her new memoir about her relationship with Susan Sontag, said that she doesn’t like to write about people she knows, but if one musts, the trick is to “be harder on yourself than you are on them.”

David Rakoff, also on the panel, said that he avoids writing about people he knows altogether — except his parents. And they, he feels, are fair game.

Jonathan Franzen’s advice on the same topic was to write about whomever you want but mention of any male character that he has distressingly small genitalia. Then no one will admit — or want to believe — that you’ve written about him.

All of that aside, the best panel over the weekend was about contemporary parenthood and featured Alice Bradley, an old favorite of mine from her blog Finslippy, who has co-written the funny/scathing Let’s Panic About Babies!; Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of my favorite bloggers and America’s best public intellectuals; and Adam Mansbach, the surprisingly smart & substantial author of Go the Fuck To Sleep. I had gone in with no expectations at all and really enjoyed hearing them all make jokes about children and about trying hard to be both a parent and a recognizable human being.

The panel I was most excited about, by contrast, featured the almighty Fran Lebowitz, the “Inconceivable!” Wallace Shawn, and author-of-my-favorite-short-story (“Days”) Deborah Eisenberg.

Photo via ElectricLiterature.com

The best thing about it was the location (all those Jews in a church on Sunday!). Otherwise, it fell kind of flat. You can always count on Lebowitz to say something hilarious, and she was exactly as sharp as you would hope she would be. “In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy,” she said, all but pounding the podium. Later, she had acidic words for America post-NAFTA: “What has replaced factories in the Midwest? Meth labs and mega churches. It goes New York–>meth labs and mega churches–>LA.”

Sadly, Shawn and Eisenberg had only standard leftist Ivory Tower talking points to contribute, and as Lebowitz wandered into the well-worn territory of carping about Kids These Days, the event became steadily less interesting. No one addressed either of the two fundamental questions I have about contemporary political life:

1) In a post-socialism world–which is to say, a world in which the left has no ideological counterpoint to capitalism to offer–what idea should we be rallying around? Less unfair democracy? More restrained capitalism? As Aaron Sorkin might say, I can’t believe no one ever wrote a folk song about that.

2) Bearing in mind that the last progressive US president to get elected to a second term was Franklin Roosevelt, how is Obama supposed to win in 2012, especially without pissing off the left? Clinton sold out to the Republicans with free trade and welfare reform; that’s a large part of why he was popular enough to compete, and even then he got a strong assist from the 3rd-party candidacy of wacko Texan Ross Perot.

So I left a bit disappointed with everyone involved. Unlike the many other people who potentially felt the same way, however, I got to express my feelings (!!) because later that afternoon, as I headed to Trader Joe’s, I passed the three panelists and a fourth individual on the street. There they were, just hanging out, Lebowitz smoking of course. (She’s the only smoker I love and almost certainly the only one I respect.)

Hitching up my resolve, I walked right to her and said, “Can I shake your hand?”

Lebowitz took her cigarette out of her mouth, held it with the fingers of her left hand, and shook my hand with her right.

“You were brilliant up there today,” I said, looking all of them in the eye one by one. “But you were wrong.”

Shawn and Eisenberg looked startled and confused, as though a waiter in a restaurant had lifted the cover off a dish to reveal a live kitten. Lebowitz merely put her cigarette back in her mouth and gave a half-shrug, half-smirk that made me want to make out with her, even though she would taste like an ashtray. Instead, I smiled once more at all of them and kept walking.

VICTORY IS MINE, SAYETH THE LORD. Or perhaps he didn’t, but he should have.

This American Ira

The night before, some friends and I hit up the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at the Bell House, where we got up and close and personal with more celebrities: Ira Glass, John Hodgman, and special guest star Rachel Maddow. Maddow told adorable, endearing stories about how she was hired by a woman to do yard work and ended up doing another kind of maintenance altogether, if you know what I mean. (In fulfilling that fantasy, for both parties, by the way, she probably deserves some sort of lesbian Medal of Honor.) Hodgman held his own, hilariously straight-faced as always, but Mirman, who I’ve also seen knock over grown people with laughter, was underutilized by the hosts, Elna and Kevin of “The Talent Show,” who seemed much more focused on making sure Ira Glass puked onstage.

They nearly got their wish, too. By midway through, Glass was so sloppily happy that he kept popping up from his chair and beaming at the audience, like a tall hipster prairie dog. Elna and Kevin kept telling him to take shots and, as Mr. Ben pointed out later, it was like improv — he couldn’t say no. By night’s end, we watched a great wave of nausea nearly topple him. His cheeks puffed out; his eyes sunk; and his wife managed to lead him offstage before he blew his cookies in front of everyone.

Also one of the comedians nearly got into a fight with some hecklers from the audience and had to be restrained. In general it was not the best show I’ve seen there but, still, watching Ira Glass turn sea-green was pretty memorable.

More to come! I swear. I have great Montana stories and at some point I’ll get to tell them.

brokers can bite me, brooklyn, First World Problems

45 / 14

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I’m so addled that I just bought three pairs of shoes in one afternoon. Granted, there were sales involved, and running shoes that are necessary because my current pair has destroyed one of my toes and I’ve been ignoring that hoping something will change for six months. But primarily I did it because I’m feeling low on impulse control right now and would like pretty things.

Of course, the real pretty things I would like are well-situated, spacious apartments with amenities. Brokers and I differ on what “amenities” are: they believe “oxygen,” “floorboards,” and “non-lead paint,” count as amenities, and expect you to pay top dollar for them. Consider this apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It is a boring, boxy 2 BR condo in a boring, boxy new tower built without any regard for neighborhood architecture; it is, furthermore, under 1000 square feet; and it is selling for nearly $1M. To which I say, “How? Does it come with leprechauns? Do the air vents release the musk of the great god Pan, making you sexually irresistible to anyone you fancy?”

Because otherwise that is a fucking waste of money. It drives me round the bend. Everywhere in north and south Brooklyn, people are willing–in direct contravention of the laws of god and man–to SETTLE, to get so little for so much. That makes it much more difficult for reasonable people like me to say, “How about I give you half a million dollars* and you give me light, space, safety, comfort, workable appliances, and even perhaps a tiny slice of the great outdoors?”

*Still, by the way, a HUGE amount of money!

It is not to be. Or, anyway, not yet. I will soldier on, boats against the current, until I find what I want: a reasonably-sized place for Ben and me to sit and ponder whether buying an apartment has finally made us adults. (Appropriately I’m currently reading this book: Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House.) “You act all twenty-something,” a friend told me recently, “but secretly you’re all thirty-something.” She’s sort of right: secretly I’m 45, and also 14. I want everything to be all settled and stable and yet I am also totally immature and unready for real life. I just want someone wiser to take care of me and make the important decisions on my behalf while I, well, buy shoes on the Internet.

america fuck yeah, faux gender theory, mizoginy, morals, movies

“Oh, loverboy!”

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This is not a good time to be asking people for money and, um, that’s my job. Earlier this week, a woman flat-out laughed at me. I imagined her with a scotch in one hand and a gun in the other.

So I think it’s a good week to do things other than work. Like think about the fantastic Dirty Dancing, which I just saw for the first time in a theater as part of a Jezebel / Abortion Access Fund event. The screenwriter-producer Eleanor Bergstein came to encourage us all to take risks, as people and as artists, and, when we put controversial events in our commercial movies, to make them impossible to remove.

“I’m so sorry,” Lipman told the acne cream company that was willing to sponsor Dirty Dancing, as long as the illegal abortion — which, in the film, has near-tragic repercussions — was removed. “It’s the linchpin of the story. Nothing would make any sense if it were removed.” The acne cream bowed out, the film was released regardless, and it became an international success.

“Always make it the linchpin,” she instructed us. “That way you can’t cave to pressure even if part of you wants to out of fear.”

Fun facts about Dirty Dancing:

* Like Wet Hot American Summer, this is a movie about Jews that never explicitly says it’s about Jews.

* During filming, the seasons changed, so the crew had to spray-paint the leaves on the trees green.

* Jennifer Grey was 27 during filming and Patrick Swayze was 35.

* The crawling-on-the-floor dance scene was improvised

* Sarah Jessica Parker and Val Kilmer were considered for the lead roles

* It won an Oscar (Best Song)

* There are like 15 plotlines going on. That’s pretty ambitious for a movie about school kids on vacation with their family.

* Some folks don’t like this movie. (I know, right?)

* I didn’t see it all the way through until I was 27 myself because my proto-feminist high school self caught a glimpse of it on TV and was insulted by the fact that the main female character was called “Baby.” Little did I realize that that was intentional — that the film was about the infantilization of women. Her liberal, well-meaning parents named her Frances after the first woman in the cabinet but then called her Baby! What could be a better example of the mixed messages affluent white girls received in the mid-20th century? Go to college but then marry some Ivy Leaguer and be content raising his children. Read and think, but not too much or no one will want you. And so on.

* Of course, the movie is also about class, back-alley abortions, and how people in 1963 would look if they had 1980s hair and dressed like they were on their way to a Jane Fonda aerobics class. (See above re: plotlines.)

It’s too bad Eleanor Bergstein didn’t write more movies because this one really is near perfect for what it is. Why would anyone try to remake it? What could they possibly add?

musing, positive thinking, wymyn

Nota Bene

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This week’s New Yorker is brought to you by:

– Paul

– Stephen

– Nicholas

– Adam

– Ben

– Alex

– Dan

– Peter

and

– Anthony.

Oh, and Patricia–writing about men’s clothes.

It’s not that I object to a male-only New Yorker. I just wish it were a “Masculinity Issue” or something rather than the status quo.

movies, travel, writing

A Little Frivolity

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What with all the growing up around these parts lately, my brain feels pretty fried. The growing up is not over, either — or rather the acting grown up, on the assumption that, like faith, if you act as though you have maturity, maturity will be given ye. We are looking at real estate. Yeah, that’s right, REAL estate, and it is called that for a reason. (Um, because it is real? I’m only guessing.)

There’s a great, affordable condo in a house in Sunset Park with its own garden and so many bathrooms every one of you could come over and use one at the same time. It’s close to the park (that view!), close to the subway (the R train counts as subway, right?), pretty, and well-kept.

There’s another great place on the fringe of Ditmas Park that’s even cheaper because it’s on the wrong side of the tracks. How much do the tracks matter? That has yet to be determined. The apartment itself is really lovely, recently renovated by its artist owners, and it just feels great — lots of good juju there. Prospect Park isn’t far away, and neither is Courtelyou with all those white-people amenities like coffeehouses and bagel shops, brunch places and farmer’s markets, that Sunset Park lacks.

For more money, there are smaller-but-nice places with gardens in Park Slope I’m checking out this week. There’s even one place close to where are now in our price range. What has made it affordable when all other local apartments are hundreds of thousands dollars more? I can’t wait to find out!

All this has made me equal parts excited and exhausted, and I can’t wait to say “Fuck this shit, I’m going to Montana,” just like the New York Times advised all of you to do this past weekend. Come stay with us! We’re renting part of a house while we’re in East Glacier and you can totally sleep on the couch.

Til then, I’m distracting myself with frivolous thoughts. Like, Mila Kunis or Natalie Portman?

Battle of the Tiny Jewesses

Mila Kunis, right, by a long shot? Natalie strikes me as being forced and stiff on camera. Though apparently millions find her sexy, I found her attempt to portray a stripper in Closer pretty horrifying. Whereas Mila radiates warmth and intelligence, as the reviews of Friends with Benefits attest.

What about Mila Kunis or Emma Stone? That’s really hard. I think I’d go with Emma Stone, who is also a charming presence on screen and is apparently livening up Crazy, Sexy, Love in theaters everywhere; it’s pretty early in both women’s careers to say definitively, though. Emma Stone or Amy Adams is also  hard (battle of the comedic redheads). I’d probably have to go with Amy because she’s been around being consistently good for a longer time. Thanks to her, I even enjoyed Enchanted. But the fact that it’s even kind of close already speaks really highly of Ms. Stone.

Clearly, when I go to the writer’s retreat later this fall at VCCA, this is what I should write about. This is my very first writer’s retreat, by the way! The idea of getting to spend two weeks in the idyllic-looking town of Amherst, Virginia — a name that strikes me as a being something of a contradiction in terms, like jumbo shrimp, but never mind — working on a manuscript in the company of other keyboardists is so blissful that I want to go RIGHT NOW.

I will contain myself. Glaciers first. No, house-hunting first, then glaciers, then keyboardist camp. But it is so nice to have things to look forward to.

movies, writing

Why O Why Don’t I Love “Paris”?

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My take on the new Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris is up on The Film Experience:

“I understand the impulse to make ourselves hoarse praising the man. After all, we’re talking about Woody Allen, auteur extraordinaire, Oscar-winner, redefiner of comedy, granddaddy to a thousand less-talented copy-cat narcissists. He’s so prolific he probably doesn’t even remember making one of my favorites of his films, the wistful and imaginative Purple Rose of Cairo. (Such small, delightful movies are often called “gems,” which confuses me as gems come in all sizes; in fact, a woman I know recently received one that may weigh more than she does. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Friends, a mediocrity is a mediocrity, whether it comes from Shakespeare or Dan Brown. Why do we insist on grading Woody Allen on a curve?”

Read more here.

birfday, life in new york, memories, musing, nostalgia

Growing Up

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How do you know when you’ve crossed the fuzzy line between prolonged-adolescence and adulthood? When you pay your own rent? Do your own taxes? When you lose a job, get another job, lose THAT job too, and keep going? When you surrender your wisdom teeth to a terrifying hobo dentist?

When all the adult men in your family are dead?

When you publish writing for money? When you can loan out money? When you begin to think of a womb as a space that, conceivably, could be filled, instead of negative — and I do mean negative — space?

When you realize that you’ve been married for four years, and four years is a presidential term, is an undergraduate education, is high school, is a LONG TIME? And you vote not to switch horses in midstream? Four more years! Four more years!

When you think about buying an apartment in a neighborhood that lacks all white-people amenities you’re used to being surrounded by (cupcakes, coffee shops, boutiques, indie bookstores, Trader Joe’s) because if you’re going to push a stroller anywhere it may as well be in this modern-day Sesame Street: past small cafes filled with families, and through a park overrun with kids, and along sidewalks where old men at tables play dominoes and bridge?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially while watching the Hogwarts kids we’ve been following for a decade finally leave the school (after getting to defend AND destroy it, which feels like an excellent metaphor to me), while reading this mind-blowing Cheryl Strayed essay, “The Love of My Life,” while bracing myself to turn 29. As you know, American women do not age beyond 29 until they hit menopause, and then they resume aging*, however grouchily, so this is quite a milestone.  (*Exception: All “Real Housewives” everywhere.)

Am I an adult? Dr. Worthless told me I was in 2007:

The original prescription for adulthood

He also gave me prescriptions for real drugs. The transactions were simple: I gave him my $40 co-pay; he gave me a scrip. “What separates you from a drug dealer?” I asked him once. “Ha ha ha!” he said. “Ha ha! But seriously, drug dealers don’t care about your health.”

Now I have a new doctor I largely trust, one who keeps me chemically in order. I also see another guy who does therapy through body work. It’s fascinating. The therapist, who I call Obi Wan for his demeanor and dress, presses on a particular muscle and associations push to the surface. Getting up off the table after an hour, I feel like Frankenstein’s monster, hyper-aware of every limb and how each connects.

And I have a new job at my job. Believe it or not, I am the “Manager of Institutional Development,” meaning I do research into various foundations and them write them earnestly to make the case that my foundation deserves their cash. That is an adult title, and my office gave it to me rather than telling me to take myself out along with the trash. (True story!) That’s progress.

Except growing up isn’t progress once you’re past 21, right? Isn’t that what we learn from the horrifying posters for The Change-Up? Babes make you happy while babies make you miserable. Commitment corrodes our free-loving souls.

Thanks Hollywood

Or is that only true for men?

Anyway.

Maybe you never actively identify as an adult until one day there are enough kids around — or twenty-somethings, but they look like kids — treating you as one. Maybe that’s how it happens. Or maybe it’s when random men stop asking when you’re going to graduate from college. I’ll just have to wait and see.

america fuck yeah, mizoginy, rantage, religion, sexism, wymyn

Gallup is Perplexed. Let Me Help.

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“It’s not clear why Americans would overwhelmingly prefer boys.”

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It’s not clear why? BECAUSE THIS IS A PATRIARCHY, you twits. Land of the free! Home of the brave! Here we worship winners, cowboys, soldiers, tough guys, Don Draper and Tony Soprano, John Wayne and Gary Cooper. We hate femininity. We hate it so much we stamp it out in boys wherever it pops up.

Here men head the household because of some misguided Catholic/Christian notion that that’s the way God wants it. (The way he wanted it several thousand years ago, anyway, when last he bothered to weigh in.) Here be Mormons.

Why wouldn’t you want a child more likely to earn more, to be judged by something other than looks, to be able to have a child himself eventually — on his schedule, no pressure — and let someone else deal with the drudgery of raising it (and cleaning up after it)?

Yes, being a real man is expensive, and it certainly can be stressful and time-consuming. It’s still better than the alternative.

Some of my best friends are ladies and good lord, even *I* want to be reincarnated as a Dutch or Scandinavian man.