A Year In New York

My friend Jen is visiting from Amsterdam to debut her erotic film, and yesterday we made a visit to the Guggenheim. We lingered at “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia” exhibit. This piece in the lobby summed it up neatly. Listen up, everyone! Ice is melting.

[Read more →]

The announcement appeared on the refrigerator: “A Brazilian Television Show Is Here at 2 p.m. Today to Do a Segment on Paragraph. Anyone Interested in Being Interviewed, Tell Lila.”

The Brazilians didn’t arrive until three, I observed as I pretended to read a book in the corner of the lunchroom. They bustled in fresh and laughing, [...]

[Read more →]

I proudly present my first movie. After returning from India last month, I reviewed the footage and thought, “People have got to see how crazy traffic is in India.” This is a road trip where the biggest adventure is the road itself.
I fed the movie into two services, Viddler and YouTube, as I search for [...]

[Read more →]

My wallet lacked $20s, so I visited the WaMu down the street. This particular block has a coffee shop,  a frozen-yogurt place and a cigar store with a wooden Indian outside, yet I like the bank the best. That’s because it’s a WaMu.
WaMu is Washington Mutual, the Seattle bank known for its open floor plan [...]

[Read more →]

As I type this post, my body vividly remembers yesterday’s maiden snowboarding trip to New Jersey, in the form of a stiff shoulder and a chest that is so bruised it hurts to exhale. Other memories are less painful.
For example, driving up Route 23 into the Kittatinny Mountains, Joo and her friend Bobbi snoozing in [...]

[Read more →]

The outward sign of hardship here in Manhattan is the empty storefronts. One walks along a bright, continuous smile of retail establishments, and suddenly there’s a gap where a shop used to be.

[Read more →]

I am concerned that President Obama has passed two and half weeks in office already, distracting himself with Economic-Stimulus-This and Closing-Guantanamo-That, while one of the hairiest questions of his presidency hangs fire: who will be our First Dog?
You’ll recall that, in the misty-eyed moments after he won the election, Obama walked onto the stage at [...]

[Read more →]

February is a tough month to be a New Yorker. Holiday cheer is far behind, spring is well ahead, temperatures clamp down in the 20s and the earmuffs aren’t fun anymore. But I am new enough to the East Coast thing to get blissed out when snow falls from the sky.
It toyed with us yesterday [...]

[Read more →]

To mark Super Bowl Sunday, I joined some fellow writers for a game of ultimate Frisbee at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. We met in the big meadow under a weak sun. The grass was dead, with just a few patches of snow, and we dashed around for two hours like Labrador retrievers. We mixed the [...]

[Read more →]