it's been one week, vol. 2

Very soon I'm off to Googa Mooga (Yeah Yeah Yeahs play tonight!!!) to stuff my face with food and my ears with music. Before the weekend in the park, though, a wrap on some great things from this week:

- Opening today is the new film directed by Noah Baumbach, Frances Ha, co-written by its star, Greta Gerwig. Clare and I went to the screening earlier this week at BAM, where Baumbach, Gerwig, and co-star Mickey Sumner were there to answer some questions and talk about the film. A lot of it was very funny, particularly in ways that I'm not sure would entirely translate outside of a NYC audience. The chemistry between the actors was great, and though many of them were flailing through life, they were incredibly likeable and warm. I also loved the bits of dance throughout, as Frances tries to make it as a modern dancer. The film also has Adam Driver, who I barely recognized without the facial hair he sports on Girls. I liked him better this way.


- The Office finally ended last night. Despite its troubles and missteps following Steve Carrell's departure, I never entirely gave up on it and have enjoyed most of this past season. The last few weeks leading up to the finale have been great, and the final episode was pretty much perfect. I always get weirdly sentimental about the ends of long TV shows, but the hour-long retrospective that aired right before the episode really got me. The finale was a nice mix of all the characters, plenty of sentimentality, but also lots of solid laughs.

- A much shorter thing I loved was this:

how could you not? A real life astronaut. I mean, what else would you want to do if you were up in the space station, right?

- Lastly, the new album from The National, Trouble Will Find Me, is streaming on iTunes and against all odds, it's just as amazing as I wanted it to be.

doc music

Two music docs which looks particularly great, by particularly great acts:


Official Trailer (2:45) from Andrew Bird: Fever Year on Vimeo.



In exactly one month I'll be seeing The National play at the Barclay's Center (pretty close to the last place I saw them, BAM Opera House). So psyched.

lately...

...I've been working on a few different projects.

Drawing, checking out the non-headlining bands that will be at Pitchfork this summer (foxygen!)(as will I with several of my friends. super. psyched.), learning (er, trying to learn) HTML and CSS, and making my own Brooklyn quilt. Fun fact: quilting is one of the first ways that I learned to sew! Talk about being a cool kid. Also, my friend and her husband just had their first baby out in Seattle, which is somewhere between exciting and terrifying. We all just sent her this onesie to initiate her into our ol' shabbos-wine-drinking gang:



As part of my quilting process, I've recently gone on a binge of movies I meant to see in theaters last year, but never did. Handquilting is mostly busy work so having something to also watch/listen to is useful if I want to work for a few hours. I've mostly been Netflixing the smaller movies that fall into the sort of quirky-indie-romcom category: Ruby Sparks, Safety Not Guaranteed, The Five Year Engagement, Lola Versus, etc. (but there was also a day spent going down the rabbithole of watching old Arrested Development episodes, which is dangerous on Netflix because the next one just queues up right away). I would most strongly recommend Safety Not Guaranteed or The Five Year Engagement. Ruby Sparks was okay, as long as you don't have a viscerally angry reaction to movies with MPDG character types. Lola Versus has Greta Gerwig, who I love, and was written by the same team as Breaking Upwards (enjoyable / streaming on Netflix), but at times made me feel like I was watching an episode of Girls. Since I already have a strange love-hate relationship with Girls, it left me with a similarly ambivalent feeling.

Today is beautiful, though, so I'm going to go outside and not think about how yesterday it snowed all day and today it's 53 degrees. Then hopefully later my mom will actually get on a flight that takes off and brings her here, as opposed to yesterday when she spent all day at O'Hare including boarding two planes, one of which actually left the gate and got in line to take off before they were told to come back and the flight was canceled. Airlines are a confusing shitshow.