The work is coming very slowly, refracted, refractory. I hear my name like it’s coming through water. I left the blank page and went uptown.

I looked up “refractory” after I typed it because I didn’t want to confuse it with “refectory.” OS X’s Oxford American Dictionary offers the example his refractory pony. I love this.

I hadn’t been to the Cloisters before. Almost one year ago Ben & I rode bikes over the George Washington Bridge and back and then went to Fort Tryon Park. It’s one of those memories that’s still very present, I see the day crisply, it felt like leaving New York. I wanted to get away from this and go to that.

Really I wanted my own cloister. The Cloisters themselves are lovely, but they’re a museum, and filled with people, babies, shovers. The atrophy of experience: digital cameras trained on pietas, dry fountains, unicorn tapestries. There is a terrace that wraps around the building from which you can see the Hudson and I guess New Jersey. I was looking for quiet. I found it in the Heather Garden of the park outside.

In the grass on the hill I read the The Last Life by Claire Messud, and the gears slowed. I didn’t have any expectations for clarity. Vague hopes that The Project (there’s always a project, but this time it’s a large looming one) would crystallize or stand down or make a tenuous promise to stop confounding, but I read and looked at the river and thought some about my block, where I would have been had I not caught the train.

Something broke. I had one of the tiny Field Notes books with me and things started to make sense. I diagrammed ideas, wrote myself notes for later concerning the manageability of the work in case I was seized by anything resembling doubt masquerading as procrastination.

Oh! The last time I scribbled about museum-going, Lynn & I went to the Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley. I took these pictures on our trip, which I’m honored to report are featured in the latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, accompanying Lawrence Wechsler’s (one of my favorite writers) article on Robert Irwin. You can’t see the photos on the VQR site, but you should consider checking out the hard copy for Wechsler’s always riveting prose. Here are the photos:

Now I’ve got spring fever. I’m a mess of allergies and sunlight and already mourning summer’s passing. This winter was kind of the pits. Better things are drawn to summer, they want to happen then. When I finished a perfect 70-degree run last weekend, Lance Armstrong’s voice came eerily on via my Nike+ iPod thingy and congratulated me on my longest run to date. Which is not true, since I’ve only had this gadget for about a year or so and I just recently allowed it to talk to me. Am I inclined to run farther to win Lance’s love again? Yes. Yes I am. Why am I so easily seduced?

I think it’s spring. The construction has abated, the days are long and therefore manageable. There is enough space in them for coffee on the corner and walking to the cleaners in Gramercy and getting A Moveable Feast from the library and seeing a movie about people who won’t feel whole until they’re paralyzed. Yeah, I saw that movie, Quid Pro Quo, tonight. Nick Stahl is aging strangely but attractively. Vera Farmiga is several varieties of troubling. The movie’s got some moments. But then it’s got some moments and you’re just like who greenlit that.

Days wide and warm, in which I wander listening to back episodes of the Fresh Air podcast. Springtime, you count. I will wear a daisy in my hair.

Okay, far be it from me to obsessively follow the fascinating twists and turns of a dead actor’s constantly changing obituary, but come on, New York Times. Now it’s just embarrassing.

From today’s corrections:

An obituary on April 7 and in some copies on April 6 about the actor Charlton Heston misstated the year he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, as well as other aspects of his life.

1. He enlisted in 1942, not 1944.
2. He served in the Aleutian Islands about two years, not three.
3. And he and his wife, the former Lydia Clarke, an actress, spent less than one year, not several seasons, at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Theater in Asheville, N.C., which they founded after the war.

These three additional corrections (you’ll recall there were about five published in the days following his death) wouldn’t be as bewildering if not for the original crapped up report. But now, two weeks later, they’re issuing more corrections? These tiny details, we can all agree, are not as crucial as when the Times got Heston’s name and age wrong, but nonetheless, they leave the paper with even more egg on its face (and its readership even more stymied).

I now imagine the New York Times obituaries are written kind of like Mad-Libs - you know, you fill in blanks like “Proper Name,” “Name of Movie Character,” “Number of Years Served in Aleutian Islands,” and end up with a mildly entertaining but usually totally unintelligible story.

Previously: New York Times Violates (At Least) Ten Commandments of Journalism in Reporting Charlton Heston’s Death

What on earth is going on with Second Avenue? I usually reserve my neighborhood codger persona for whinging about how crazy loud and invasive the Cooper Square Hotel Hostel is. But the situation with Thai restaurants on Second has just gotten bananas and I can’t sit in silence any longer.

Okay, forgive this totally-specific-to-my-neighborhood post in advance but I need to discuss something.

For a million years, Thailand Cafe has flourished — or rather existed — on Second between 5th and 6th Streets. It got a weird clubland makeover last year and a sans-serif logo that was a lot better than its green dragon-lady signs of yore, but still Thai.

East Village Thai, which you’d think from it’s creepy awning would suck but is actually terrific (I usually default to the Gang Massaman) is at Second Avenue and 7th Street.

Sea Thai is decent but kind of insane if you eat in there on the weekend, on Second between 4th and 5th Streets.

Holy Basil, while not next door, bears mentioning as it is yet another Thai restaurant, and has been rattling around forever at spitting distance: Second between 9th & 10th Streets.

So that’s a lot of Thai in a few block radius.

But now another Thai place, the very lamentably named Kurve, replete with weird Spirograph rainbow sign, is opening at Second Avenue and 5th Street. I will never get over that name. I will never get over the Cooper Square Diner that was there when I moved in and was lit solely by pink neon lights.

Then today I noticed ANOTHER THAI PLACE is opening in the old Bamboo House Chinese restaurant (where I saw a rat once) at Second Ave. and 6th Street. This time it’s Spice, which is kind of good, and the nearest branch is MILLIONS OF MILES AWAY on University Place and 10th Street. But wait. Aren’t Spice and Sea owned by the same people? Yes they are!

What is going on? I’m sure I even missed some Thai restaurants in this teensy radius. If I knew how to make a customized Google map, I’d do that. I like Thai food. I like to have Thai food options. But I have a bad feeling that someone’s not going to survive this situation. I fear it may be poor, Queer-Eyed Thailand Cafe. It’s right in the eye of the storm and it’s been having a weird identity crisis for a while.

This whole post is ridiculous and very “Area Woman Wonders Why There Are So Many Thai Restaurants In Neighborhood” but what are blogs for if not observational blather? I know. Selling awesome things.

I wrote about where to dispose of your old electronics in NYC.

You know it’s amazing how much time & toil can go into something like this. The amount of fact-finding research that goes into something so seemingly straightforward is never visible to the eye after it’s published. I’d venture it’s easier to write a long, expansive feature than it is to write a no-full-sentences chart.

The info is quite useful. I just saw an air conditioner on the street outside my apartment yesterday. I’ve become more of pious recycler since researching this. I wonder if I was subliminally influenced to use the word “pious” because I’ve been up since 6am and am on my second round of Morning Edition and they are going nuts over the Pope’s visit. And the airline merger. And taxes.

Dump Your Junk [NY Mag]

Friends. Do not be alarmed. Chickarina has been viciously hacked. In the worst way. You might see some dirty gross weirdness showing up in blog posts. The site itself may look like it was crafted by a 3-year-old out of Legos. I assure you this is temporary and we will soon be back after some serious maintenance. Until then, please bear with us.

Let it be known, welcome visitors from Google Reader (where all the filth that has been weirdly appended to the regular posts is made visible, the Huffington Post, Gawker and all points non-New York, that we at the Chickarina blog are not typically peddlers of smut. In fact, we peddle it not at all, but are at the mercy of some pernicious spam outfit determined to bring down the juggernaut that is this blog.

Presently, unable to post directly to my Wordpress blog, I am availing myself of the lifesaving free trial of MarsEdit, which I may have to actually purchase if the whole pernicious hate criminals continue to spam and defile the driven-snow purity of this poor, ailing, hacked and sent to a chop-shop blog.

Alas, poor Chickarina! I knew her, Readers: a blog
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy!

Which is worse: dirty porn spam, or lame Shakespeare appropriation for feeble attempt at dramatic effect? I kind of nauseate myself. Not as much as the dirty porn, but close.

Also: If you find something amiss, like a 500-line garbled list of dirty words in a blog post, could you email the authorities? Thanks.

So Charlton Heston, actor & gun-lover, died on Saturday night. The New York Times ran his obituary on Sunday, and since has had to issue a string of corrections that are so ridiculous that they make one wonder who on earth is driving the bus over there.

This ran today:

An obituary in some editions on Sunday and in some copies on Monday about the actor Charlton Heston misstated his given name at birth. It was John Charles Carter, not Charlton Carter. The obituary also referred incorrectly to the character played by Orson Welles in the film “Touch of Evil,”€ in which Mr. Heston had a starring role. The character, Quinlan, is a police captain, not a sheriff. And a list of Mr. Heston’€™s films accompanying the obituary on Monday misstated the relationship between two characters in the film Midway,€ in which Mr. Heston played a Naval officer. The characters, the officer’s son and a woman of Japanese descent, are hoping to marry; they are not already married.

They misstated his name?

This is in addition to what ran shortly after the obit was published:

A front-page obituary and a headline in some editions on Sunday about the actor Charlton Heston misstated his age and the year of his birth. He was 84, not 83, and was born in 1923, not 1924.

Evidently Heston may have been lying about his age, but that’s really where the crack reporting force at the Times might have done a touch of sleuthing. Or fact-checking.

Obituaries of people of this stature are, as we all know by now, written years in advance, and updated periodically. And with every draft and update comes editing. I don’t know how far in advance this obit was written or how many times it was rewritten or appended or the lede was changed or whatever, but it was probably at least five times, if not more. (The guy had cancer in 1999, and in 2002 confirmed he “announced that he had received a diagnosis of neurological symptoms ‘consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.’”) And somehow in all of those edits, plus the certain re-editing before Sunday’s publication, they got his name and birthdate wrong, as well as numerous details about the films he was in.

I tend to believe the Times when they report the news, and certainly I don’t feel personally offended by the totally sloppy inaccuracies in this obit. But, as a reader of the paper, as well as a writer, I wonder about the priorities of the Times‘ newsroom. Were the writers more concerned with style than accuracy, leaving it to editors to check his work? Do editors think checking facts is beneath them? Did copy editors have no time to read over a 2,400-word piece?

There’s a pathetic irony in the kicker for the piece:

“You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’€™clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “to get it right one time.’”

Dear Hillary & Barack:

The emails are getting out of control. I’m on both of your mailing lists and you and your “surrogates” are totally spamming the crap out of me.

Related: I know you and Tim Russert like to vacillate between calling you by your first names during debates. But you really need to stop signing your emails with your first names. It’s totally unpresidential. I like when you call me “Friend–” or use a mail merge to address the email “Dear Melissa,” but we are not dating. Nor are we pals. You want to be the leader of the free world. I want you to sign your mash notes “Senator.” Because once you’re elected or not elected, I have a feeling I’m never going to hear from you again. All this chummy , one-way epistolary affection is going to cease, and I’m going to feel abandoned.

That’s it. For now. I’m freaked out by a lot of other stuff going on in the campaign, but I thought I’d start here, since the Huffington Post’s reporting and much of the Times’ opinion page are much more incisive. By the way, you’re still on my list, MoDo.

Sincerely,
Ms. Melissa Kirsch

Previously: I work myself up into a (gentle) lather over email signing.

You’d be a fool not to check out the most beautiful letterpress cards in the world.

Messenger Bird Press is the hyper-cool operation of my pal Kelly Hands, who also happens to be the designer of this very website. The designs are pretty and deft and lovely. Swoonworthy, even.

I find it slightly disturbing

when women refer to their breasts as “the girls.”

Let me just be frank with you. I am a late-in-life addict of Gilmore Girls. There’s not even anything quietly subversive about that show that would make this a fake confession. I did whisper that I had been watching it to my lunch date the other day and was informed that that was not something I had to hide and everyone watches it. I don’t think anyone should admit to liking this show so freely. It’s got this “Hey I’m kind of edgy what with my whippersnapper banter and teenage mom gone mild” affect, but then it turns out that the show is about white people (and one token Korean friend) in a fake Connecticut village (and I know from Connecticut villages) who are so obsessed with coffee! And they have a lot of town pageants! And people dress up like soldiers and got to DAR meetings and when the weird daughter misses her mom’s community college graduation she apologizes so profusely that you would think she knifed someone. But I digress.

I spent Saturday afternoon to last night completely indoors working. (I know that’s horrible. It was indeed horrible. What can I say? What can I say besides: flow. Just kidding. I’ve been to Stars Hollow more times than I’ve been in a flow state.) It was important. I had to get about ten things done and it was the culmination of a week of worrying about deadlines and avoiding them and even having Leigh come over to sit with me while I worked which helped a little but not enough. I missed Amichai’s Oscar party. I missed the two days of sunlight. I was inside typing and so I decided it would be a good idea to watch Across the Universe, that Julie Taymor Beatles movie, which it was not. Then I decided I could not go wrong with some GG. I dozed off immediately. I am sure the plot had something to do with the town green and a fair or a pageant or a snowman-making contest.

I didn’t sleep well. You know when you think you’re sleeping and then you realize you are not asleep and you are kind of using all your energy to try to be asleep and you toss and turn in the dark and realize you are so very awake? That is what happened. And of course it was then impossible to wake up this morning. Even though the hoist thing on the construction site has developed a totally superfluous creaky wheel so it makes extra, non-essential noise now on top of its groaning and rumbling and the saw noise that you feel in your brain, you hear it but it also hits your brain metalically.

All work and no play makes me a dull boy. Seriously. I’m a boy now. No one warned me.

So I’ve had time to discover that I don’t hate celery anymore! I cannot brook one chunk of it in my tuna salad, but I’m cool with it by itself raw or cooked in a melange of steamed vegetables. I used to not be able to eat anything that had been in the same room with celery. Now I can tolerate it. All work and no play makes me ridiculous.

Did I mention my skin is still shit? Also that I am strangely fascinated by Diablo Cody? Even though I know I’m supposed to hate her and be jealous of her and feel somehow like she’s treading on my turf because she’s a wiseass and is working this rockabilly thing (that I am so decidedly not working, but girls tend to hate on other girls, and girl writers–forget it.). Anyway, I don’t hate her. I liked Juno. As I said, I’d walk a mile in the snow in uninsulated boots to see Michael Cera sneeze. And I think her blog is kind of amazing and certainly entertaining. I don’t suppose it really makes one whit of difference what I think of a famous screenwriter. But I’d just like to say that I am not interested in taking part in the Diablo Cody Backlash. Not that anyone’s tapped me to join in any convincing way.

Oh and make no mistake: I am jealous of her. Where did “make no mistake” come from? I think it was George Bush. Presidential candidates say that. They also refer to all people as “folks” and Ben says it’s a Bush cowboy thing and Catherine says it’s an effort to be folksy but I say what the hell, what’s wrong with people? What is wrong with you people? That packs a much harder punch than “What is wrong with you folks?” I see. If I say “folks” you think I like you. It’s gentler. What I hate is when they say “There’s folks.” As in “there’s folks in Ohio who don’t have a pot to piss in.” Yeah, they say “pot to piss in” too. Presidential candidates.

It may interest you to know that I am multitasking, i.e. waiting for the Chelsea Clinton Nightline interview to happen which means I have the TV on and I have twice seen this repulsive NYC Health commercial about smoking that shows disgusting rotten teeth among other disgusting things. Probably a black lung in a jar. They always show that. I cannot see anything gross involving teeth. I can see a lot of gross stuff like people eating grubs but I cannot see teeth getting ripped out. Like how they keep showing Joanie getting her teeth ripped out on America’s Next Top Model? Or the moment at which I stopped watching that horrid Ashley Judd movie Bug when the paranoid boyfriend starts pulling his teeth out with pliers. Ugh. I’m sick. I will watch someone vomit his/her guts out but I will not watch you pull your teeth out. Please. Stop making me watch you pull your teeth out. I beg you, folks.

If you were to assume I have been shut inside my apartment for the entire season watching bad TV and bad movies, you would be mistaken. I go out a lot and I hate every second of it. Because it’s cold and rainy and I take this personally, folks. Oh! If I address you as folks, I’m breaking some bad news. If I refer to others in the third person as folks “There’s folks in Afghanistan…” or “Folks just want someone to be a a uniter, not a divider,” I seem gentle.

It now seems that the Chelsea Clinton interview is on and I have never heard Chelsea Clinton speak before. Have you? Chelsea’s in Lubbock, Texas. She’s got a folksy way about her! She just said “Forgive my voice, I’ve been workin’ hard.” Droppin’ your Gs is very folksy. Chelsea’s boyfriend is very good looking. Gossip columnist Lloyd Grove is awful. I think Chelsea’s long layers must take a lot of blowing out and flat-ironing. And then sometimes a curling iron.

Okay. I am not going to live-blog Nightline. That would be terribly depressing. I’d like to announce that things are happening. The work has not been for naught and I’m making progress. Someday I’ll emerge, like a Chelsea Clinton from an Applebee’s in Lubbock.

PS I am actually going to Texas!!! This weekend! A light (literally) on the horizon!

PPS I made a dermatologist appointment. Of course she can’t see me until the end of March. At which point I will probably have magically flawless skin.

PPPS That Chelsea Clinton interview was lame. And not an interview.

Did I just type that? What kind of lame punster am I? I can’t seem to not make that the headline.

The Běžná cena was 499,-Kč, but you can get it for the klubová cena of 399,- Kč How weird and great.

So Conde Nast has this very fun online TV show called The Daily Special and today I am a guest on it. If you go to their site and leave your favorite bit of advice, you can win a signed copy (this time a real book included!) of TGGTAE.

In other news: It’s wet, winter continues, MoDo irks, acne resurfaces, deadlines are met only to be replaced by new ones, blogging frustrates, Pilates offers some relief, or at least connects mind & body, so oft at odds these days. These days.

I missed this in the Times on January 20th.

Not all holdouts need to be skirted; some can actually be incorporated. That’s the approach being taken by the 21-story 145-room Cooper Square Hotel at East Fifth Street. A four-story brick tenement adjacent to the hotel — unlike three other buildings on the lot — is not being razed, because its tenants wouldn’t relocate.

Those longtime residents will remain on the building’s top two floors, said Matthew Moss, a principal of the New York-based Peck Moss Hotel Group, the developer. But hotel offices will occupy its second floor and basement, while a library complete with fireplace will take up the 775-square-foot ground-floor space. Hotel guests will be able to reach it via the lobby.
Mr. Moss says he considers it an asset that guests in the $100 million hotel, which opens this summer, may peer down on a tenement roof where laundry is being hung out to dry.

“That’s the kind of thing people want to see,” he said.

You know what I like to see? I like to see slobbering construction workers loafing around on scaffolding smoking cigars and grunting, one inch from my window. Especially when I get out of the shower. I love seeing that. It’s so adorable.

If you delve into the archival folders of your computer, you (if you’re me), find the darndest things.

In a Word document, all by itself on the page, just this sentence:

Avoid reference to an adult female as girl; to women collectively as the distaff side; or the fair sex; to a wife as the little woman; to a female college student as a coed; to an unmarried woman as bachelor girl; spinster; or old maid.

In a folder labeled FRAGMENTARY which is housed in a folder labeled CANADA SEPTEMBER 2002. What was I trying to tell myself? It’s like sifting through someone else’s subconscious.

I have recently been recommended two very fine, very affordable health and beauty aids that have turned me out like no others. Please forgive the Allure magazine content of this post and help me out.

My skin has been a total itchy blotchy mess. Attempts to fix it with every righteously labeled product I could find at Kiehl’s were futile and maybe made it worse. (Tinted Ultra-Moisturizer: Not a good idea, Big K.) I was recommended these two drugstore-available products by friends. No one is secretly slipping me shopping bags full of swag. I am not on Lancome’s secret sample list. YET. (Are you listening, Lancome?)

1. RoC Age Diminishing Moisturizing Night Cream My skin had gotten all red and bumpy and scaly and gross. I thought it was the beginning of the end. Or certainly the beginning of leprosy. This stuff is addictive. It's not too heavy, it actually sloughs of dead skin so you have this (not altogether unpleasant) sensation of molting as you apply it. It gets rid of your red bumpy face that reminds one of the time Ramona and Beezus were served meat with a rough surface that turned out to be tongue. It's turned my life around. I'd be tempted to wear it during the day if I hadn't also acquired RoC SPF 15 Soy Complex daily moisturizer. So far, no new zits. The day moisturizer is thicker and not as fun as the night cream but the red, contour map situation is gone.

Price: $12-$15 at Rite Aid, a drugstore that has four products on the shelf and this was one of them, so you shouldn’t have a problem. If you have an Amazon Prime situation going on, I’m sure you can get like four for $1 or something.