Spring Break(!!!) Part Two: Berkeley, San Fran, and Napa.... and Founding One's Own Magazine

Well, spring break is starting to seem like a distant memory, but a fond one. I love California. Coming back to cold, rainy New York, I started to wonder why we don't all just pack our belongings and head west. But spring is beginning to bloom in the city that never sleeps and I am feeling happier.

Hmmm.... to quickly sum up Berkeley/Northern California: running past cows at Inspiration Point, running past strangely gopher-like squirrels at the Berkeley Marina, running past students on Berkeley's campus (I ran a lot over spring break), inadvertently watching burlesque at El Rio in The Mission, hiking in Napa Valley (photo at right), and thrift store vintage apparel shopping in Santa Cruz.

Upon my return to New York, I saw this article in the Times: Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick . It's a California-based (of course) service that allows users to self-publish magazines:

With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter’s volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

NYU should probably have a course on this at the Journalism Institute, since it's how we grad students may be most likely to see our words on the printed page.

Speaking of, yet another magazine has announced it's ceasing "real" publication, though it will live on in Web form. R.I.P. Blender. I kind of loved the US-Weeklified-Rolling-Stone imitator.

Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick [New York Times]
Print Version of Blender Magazine Will Cease Publication [New York Times]

Spring Break(!!!) Part One: The City of Angels... and Doctors and Octuplets

Radio silence has fallen on the blog due to my wandering over to the West Coast for spring break. There are many funny, youth-ifying things about going back to school, but having "spring break" and "summer vacation" make me feel the most like a kid again.

I spent the first half of the week in Los Angeles, visiting my best friend since middle school and her husband, who are both doctors. Since my friend will be specializing in fertility, a recurrent topic of conversation was Octo-mom, aka Nadya Suleman, the California woman who just popped out eight little ones after fertility treatments. My friends tell me that Suleman will be making over six figures per year thanks to California's generous welfare system. When babies are born to low-income Californians, the state provides a monthly stipend. If the babies are born premature (as all the octuplets were), the stipend is higher. Now that Suleman has a litter of over 10 kids (several preceded the octuplets), she'll be making close to $10K per month, per my friends' estimates. Maybe I should drop out of J school and sign up for baby-making school. Sounds like the money's much better.

(As an aside, most fellow doctors think poorly by Suleman's doctor for his willingness to implant her with a ridiculous number of embryos. If you were to play word association games with his name, the following would come up: Unethical, disgusting, shameful, a disgrace to the profession.)

In the course of the conversation, my friend raised an interesting question being discussed within the medical community -- what to do with unused embryos? When a couple decides to undergo fertility treatments, they usually stash away at least 10 embryos. Sometimes, people don't end up using them at all. Or the first two implanted take, and they don't need the rest. What do you do with the leftovers?

Other things in L.A.: Picked up LA City Beat, an alternative weekly, and recognized an NYU journalism grad among the bylines. Good to know a few of them have found employment... Saw my dad's best friend from high school who is now a screenwriter -- economy is bad for them too... Interviewed a professional matchmaker for my dating beat -- my favorite quote from her, regarding the difficulty in finding matches for babyboomer women: “If she was ever beautiful, she expects to be with a beautiful man. Even if she was only beautiful when she was in the 7th grade. And now she’s 55, and she’s lost her figure, and her face looks like it was run over by a truck.”

Stay tuned for San Francisco adventures.

Riding the Wave

My inauguration stories are still getting picked up, so says my Livewire editor. Last week, she sent me a link to one of my stories in Wave JOURNEY's Travellers' Tales section.

This reminds me of two things:

1. Waves: Lawrence Weschler (my professor this semester and a man of wonder) encouraged our Fiction of Nonfiction class to read Bill Finnegan's excellent piece on surfing. It ran in two parts in the New Yorker in 1992. Beyond being a great exploration of the attraction of surfing, it uses surfing as a metaphor for writing. How we're all out in this dark soup of the ocean trying to figure out which stories are waves worth riding, and which ones are just going to peter out. I find myself thinking of this each time I dive into a new piece, desperately hoping it's the kind of story that will make me yell "Cowabunga" at some point.

2. This story: The first time this piece was picked up, the father of the little girl I interviewed and quoted at the end sent me the following e-mail. I thought it was adorable:

Please pass on my sincere thanks to Kashmir Hill for her inclusion of her interview of my eight-year-old daughter in her January 18th story about D.C. stores and vendors during President Obama's inauguration. Lelia will remember the event forever and was thrilled to be interviewed by a reporter. That the piece was featured in NYC Pavement Pieces is particularly gratifying to me. I am a graduate of Pratt Institute and for eight years lived in the West Village, seven of those years on Bleecker Street, a mere seven minute walk from the front door of NYU Law School (I timed the walk as part of my LSAT preparation). I have missed New York every day since leaving and would return in a New York Minute if the right opportunity arose.

As the grandson and son of newspapermen, I have a special appreciation for journalists. Please keep up the good work and let Ms. Hill know that I intend to check out her work at Above the Law, although I suspect it only will add to my current anxiousness about being a lawyer in 2009!

I was touched by this. I wrote back to him to thank him for the note, but warned him that Above The Law is a bit depressing these days. It seems like 80 percent of what we write about concerns layoffs nowadays, unfortunately.

Second Thoughts [Wave JOURNEY]

The latest byline: Interview with a professional matchmaker

My latest published piece is up on Livewire, NYU's wire service. Hopefully, it'll be picked up and run by one of Livewire's subscribers. Here's the intro:

Lisa Clampitt married her husband within two months of meeting him. Six years ago, she spotted the City University of New York professor while getting coffee. She introduced herself, and after chatting for 20 minutes, he asked her to marry him. Two dates later, they sent out Evites for the wedding.

If finding love were that easy for everybody, Clampitt would be out of work.

Clampitt, 44, is a professional matchmaker. She’s president of the high-end New York City matchmaking service VIP Life, and co-founder of a school to train matchmakers, the Matchmaking Institute.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Yup, there's seriously a Matchmaker Institute here! New York has everything.

A Matchmaker Talks About What's Really Important [Livewire]

Getting animated

Back in the 80s, and maybe even for a brief part of the 90s, my favorite clothes were skorts, my favorite accessory was the slap bracelet, and my favorite movies were animated-- the The Land Before Time perhaps topping the list. Even though I know animated films are all the rage these days -- with many of my friends in Hong Kong raving about Kung-Fu Panda this summer -- I still associate animated films with childhood, and tend to steer clear unless I have a child to entertain.

But in the past week, I've seen two animated features that are making me rethink my aversion to the cartoon set. On Saturday, I checked out a series of presentations that were part of The Wonder Cabinet, a series on "wondrous stuff" organized by the NYU Institute of the Humanities and its director Lawrence Weschler (who teaches me the Fiction of Nonfiction this semester). My favorite presentation from the day was an excerpt from Fears of the Dark, a creepy black-and-white animated short film. A robber creeps into a house in the dead of a snowy night, and ends up the victim rather than the victimizer. The film, with its suspenseful shadows and suggested dangers, was supremely creepy.

With the appetite for animation whetted, I checked out Waltz with Bashir, an Israeli animated film about the massacre in Beirut during Israel's war with Lebanon. It was a deeply disturbing movie in its exploration of the horror of war and its effects on the psyche of Israeli soldiers.

So, I'm coming around on animation, but only those animated films of the disturbing, horrifying, distressing variety.

Birth Announcement: A new blog has been born

Well, it's already a month old, but I have a new blog. It's for one of my classes at NYU, which I have discussed before. The class is called Porfolio-- its tagline is "The Journalism of Ideas." It "brings young journalists together to harness their passions and ideas and develop a cohesive, thematically related body of work."

My body of work is called The Not-So Private Parts. Heh. The theme is that privacy is gradually fading away, due to security needs (surveillance cameras, etc); technology (data breaches, the amount of information we ourselves put online through social networks, etc.); and a culture that celebrates exhibitionism/exposure.

Take a look at my Porfolio profile here.

And take a look at my new baby: The Not-So Private Parts blog. If you have suggestions for improving the private parts, shoot me an e-mail. It feels a bit amorphous now, but I look forward to its developing over the next year. You know, learning to walk, eating solid foods, etc.

A little history of Gramercy Park (Or, getting to know my 'hood)

While I was doing Proquest research on Kips Bay for my movie theater piece, I came across a New York Times article by Charles de Kay from 1905 about my neighborhood: Gramercy. I have to admit that I am not Gramercy's biggest fan. I don't really know any of the bars or restaurants near my place because I tend to seek out other neighborhoods for entertainment, notably the East Village, Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side. Apparently, I've written off everything to the north and west...

There is one little bar near my apartment, called Three Steps, that I've visited twice. The second time, the bartender told us about her acting career--the highlights being a topless appearance on an HBO show and an upcoming movie about a circus freak show--before offering to take us back to the bathroom for some illicit substances. Not exactly my scene, nor Gramercy's. With the exception of that incident, I would describe the neighborhood as a little bland, a little generic. A place for people who want to be in Manhattan close to the Village, but who don't want to pay monster-sized rents.

Anyway, I came across this old article on the neighborhood and discovered some interesting details about the 'hood and its private park, which looks beautiful from outside its gates-- only those living on its borders have keys to enter the fenced-in block-sized park and wander its paths. Even back in 1905, Gramercy had the last remaining private park in the City:

Outsiders are they, rank outsiders, and one can see on their faces a trace of indignation that they, too, cannot play about that splashing fountain, which seems so thin to us today, and disport themselves under the shade of the trees. For this private recreation ground is open only to the owners or occupiers of the houses round about who are compelled by the terms of their purchase or lease to contribute annually to a fund for the maintenance of the park...

[G]enerally speaking the exclusiveness that began fourscore years ago has been maintained, and Gramercy Park today is still a little haven of quiet.

Yes, and still today in 2009. In 1905, Gramercy was being invaded by clubs: the Players Club ("for actors and lovers of the drama"), Columbia University Alumni Club, and the National Arts Club. Columbia has since moved on to the university club cluster near Grand Central, but the other two remain in their mansion dwellings around the Park.

The article seeks to answer the question of the origins of "Gramercy," a corruption of the name given to it by the Dutch who settled the area. The area used to consist of a hill and stream that were called Crummashie Vly and Crummashie Kop. "Crummashie" morphed into "Gramercy" over time. The article says:

[T]here is in English the old word "cramesy" for red or crimson, a word that is known in French and Dutch; so that if the hill where the park now is was of red clay and in the Fall covered with crimson foliage it might have been called by the first settlers Cramesy Kop.

I like that image. It makes me like the neighborhood a wee bit more.

The area was first a 20-acre farm owned by James Duane in 1780, then was purchased by Bank of Commerce founder Samuel Ruggles, whose son divided the land into parcels and sold them off. The private park was landscaped, and the fountain (then valued at $3,000) placed there in 1851. That would be $75K in today's dollars.

These are the illustrations accompanying the article. Things really haven't changed much... well, maybe the hats.