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]