Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2009

Roommate Leaving / Anyone Know Someone Looking for a Place?

One of my roommates is moving out Dec. 15 -- the other roommate said he's going to post on Craigslist to try and find someone, but I figure odds of ending up with a decent roommate are better if we get someone through a more filtered network.  Hence, details below, and my invitation to pass this along to anyone looking for a place in LA, and have them e-mail me if they're interested.  And, hey, here's an incentive I just thought of -- if you end up helping me find a good new roommate, I'll send you a free copy of Anonymous Lawyer.

Seriously, the apartment's really nice, my other roommate is hardly here (and he's a nice guy anyway), and when I was looking for a place to live this apartment was so much better than anything else I looked at.  I feel like I got really lucky finding it on Craigslist, and now I want to prevent anyone else from having that same luck on Craigslist by finding someone who is less likely to murder me than whoever we will end up finding on Craigslist.

Here's the info -- e-mail me with any questions / for more info.

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One bedroom available in a spacious 3-bedroom/2-bathroom apartment in Brentwood (on Gorham just off San Vicente and Barrington) -- one of my roommates is moving out Dec 15 -- we're looking for someone to start either Dec 15 or Jan 1.  $925/month plus utilities.  non-smoking only, no pets.

I've only been here since August but the other roommate has been here for a few years, and has made the place really nice -- huge HDTV in the living room with DirecTV and DVR, leather couches, nice dining room table, carpeting, brand new refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, high-speed Internet.  Washer/dryer in the basement.

The apartment's in a great location -- a block from Whole Foods and Pinkberry, easy walk to a whole bunch of restaurants and stores, and the Brentwood Farmers Market.  I'm used to NYC and hate having to drive everywhere -- at least here, a bunch of stuff is walkable, there are days I don't have to use the car, it's probably about as good as it gets in terms of walkability in LA.

The bedroom available is the smallest of the three bedrooms, but it's still a decent size.

The other roommate and I (both male) are both clean, quiet, looking for someone easy to live with.  E-mail me (jeremy.blachman@gmail.com) for more info.

Some Links

Heading back to LA this afternoon.  Before I close my web browser, a few links:

Terrific interview with Kevin Falls, creator of the NBC show Journeyman.  I really, really like Journeyman.  No one else seems to be watching it, but people should be.  It's really good.  The interview backs up my hunch that it takes an awful lot of effort to write this show, with white boards and all that stuff, to keep track of what's going on in the present, the past, and how it all intersects.  Check it out.  Definitely worth watching.  Last night's episode was especially strong.

Deadline Hollywood Daily says the strike is going to be over soon.  There's a link in there to a Bloomberg News piece about the site's writer, Nikki Finke.  It says she's 53 years old.  I pictured her much younger.  I think it's a blogger bias.  I assume everyone writing blog posts is my age.   Even if that was true 5 years ago, when I started blogging, it's certainly not true anymore.

Doug McGrath has a piece in Newsweek about the strike.  McGrath was in the same theater group I was in at Princeton (but twenty years earlier) and I met him a few times.  He's the writer and director of a bunch of movies, including Emma and Nicholas Nickleby.

Good post about the strike, I think.  I haven't read it yet, but it looks good.

Funny piece by an Everybody Loves Raymond writer who I saw on a panel once.

Numbery piece on the Huffington Post that explains the strike points.

My girlfriend wants to know...

...if there are any single Jewish guys in DC or NY that might be up for getting set up with a couple of her friends.  Seriously, if you (or someone you know!) are Jewish, single, looking, and live in New York or DC, she may know the perfect girl for you.  She has a couple of friends who are recently-single and looking, and I offered to post this just to see if there'd be a response.  I might have been kidding.  But as it turns out, I guess I wasn't kidding.  So here's the post.  More details upon request.  I've met some of the people she's trying to set up, so I can vouch for them not being insane.  I know, they sound too good to be true!  Anyway, if you're interested (or have a cool friend who'd be up for getting set up), seriously, send me an e-mail and I'll help her play matchmaker.  And imagine the fun story you'll be too embarrassed to tell anyone if it actually works out!  How'd you meet?  Oh, you answered a blog post that her friend's boyfriend wrote?  How romantic and totally not weird!

Friday Night Lights

Over here you can watch a 3-minute segment from the Today show about Friday Night Lights, which returns tonight with the first of four new episodes, the last four of the season.  Really, it's the best show on television.  I hope it gets renewed for next year.  Especially after reading a bunch of the pilot scripts for shows that could end up replacing it.  :)

Show Business

First off, for anyone following: my grandma went home from the hospital today.  Still taking it easy, but it seems like she's doing fine.  Thanks to everyone who e-mailed their concerns.

Thanks to a friend, I had the chance to see a screening tonight of a documentary called "Show Business," following four Broadway shows from the 2003-04 season from development to opening night to the Tony awards.  Liked it a lot.  Avenue Q and Wicked are the stars of the film, and they also follow Taboo and Caroline or Change.  Donald Trump will like this film, since it paints Rosie O'Donnell (who was one of the producers of Taboo) in a somewhat-unflattering light, although mostly just through a montage of newspaper articles and news coverage and not actually showing anything negative she did, whatever that was.  Lots of behind-the-scenes footage of rehearsals.  Lots of interviews with the creators of the shows, some interviews with actors, a bunch of roundtables with theater critics.  A heck of a lot of "B-roll footage" -- montages of other shows, crowds in line, opening night parties, etc.  Thought it did what it was trying to do about as well as it could be done.  I've seen Wicked and Avenue Q, but never saw Taboo or Caroline.  Had I seen none of the 4 musicals, I'm not sure the film would have been as interesting, but I'm pretty sure the audience they'll be going for is an audience that has seen at least a couple of the shows.  Hard not to like movies where writers are the stars, kind of.

Speechwriting for the President

Really interesting Times article about the President's speechwriters and the upcoming state of the union speech.

Book Thoughts: This Is Your Brain On Music

Fascinating.  Really cool book.  Daniel Levitin was a record producer and became a neuroscientist.  So he's pretty uniquely qualified to write a book about how the brain processes music.  There's some basic stuff on music theory that you can skim if you've taken any music classes, but then he goes into how we process pitch and tempo and rhythm, and how we can tell one instrument from another -- and how a synthesizer can mimic those sounds....  It's all written for a popular audience -- it just felt like a nice opportunity to skim the surface of what a guy like Levitin, researching Music and the Brain, spends his days thinking about, and what some of the key ideas here are.  Interesting stuff.

Larry King Doesn't Use The Internet

Amusing bit from Larry King Live -- video here.

Last night CNN’s Larry King confessed to Roseanne Barr that he’s never used the Internet. King expressed doubt that the Internet was a viable political medium because “there’s 80 billion things on it.” When Barr said she liked the Internet, King acknowledged that “I’ve never done it, never gone searching.”

Barr said King would love the internet if he tried it. King replied, “I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?”

A few links and brief reviews

Really interesting (short) interview in the Times with author Alain de Botton.  I had to read some of his stuff for a law school class on emotions and psychology and the law, and it was a little too highbrow for me, but I took another book of his, Status Anxiety, out of the library last week and am hoping to get to it at some point.

Saw the shows Smoking Bloomberg, Flight of the Lawnchair Man, and Captain Gravy's Wavy Navy at the New York Musical Theater Festival in the past week.  Captain Gravy would be a cool show to see especially if you've got kids you want to expose to theater -- it's basically a cartoon on stage, with some nice music and colorful characters.  I think there's a Friday and Saturday show still to go.

Read "The Reach of a Chef" by Michael Ruhlman the other day.  I'll add it to the sidebar.  It's a nice book about the celebrity chef culture, a bunch about Thomas Keller (Per Se, where two friends of mine ate this past weekend for their 2nd anniversary and enjoyed) and Emeril and Mario Batali and a bunch more chefs.  I liked it a lot, it's a good read if this stuff appeals, but I don't have a lot more to say about it.  Also read Anthony Bourdain's "The Nasty Bits" last week but forgot to blog about it.  "Kitchen Confidential" is Bourdain's hit book.  I liked that one a lot.  This one is a collection of columns.  It wasn't bad but read Kitchen Confidential instead.  Or The United States of Arugula, or Heat, or The Omnivore's Dilemma, or The Reach of a Chef, all of which I found more enjoyable.

I think that's the last of the food-related books on my reading list, which is probably a good thing because mostly they just make me hungry.

I did get to try a dessert last week at a place called Room 4 Dessert, which was written up in the New Yorker a few weeks ago.  Interesting.  Sesame flavored gelato and raspberry foam and something else I can't remember.  Strong flavors.  I'd go back, but I'd get something else, and I'd hope that once again someone else was paying, since $12 is expensive for a few spoonfuls of dessert.

An update on some stuff from last week: my mom had a follow-up surgery on Monday to make sure the cancer is all gone, and we're waiting on pathology results, hopefully it'll come back clean, and then she'll start treatment.  And my first day tutoring at 826NYC last Thursday was cool, helped a bunch of kids with their homework, found it fairly rewarding, excited to go back this week.

A Times magazine article about satire that I keep meaning to read, but haven't yet.  If anyone else has, feel free to tell me if it's worth reading.

Liked the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother a lot.  Wasn't really into the show for most of last season, until the last couple of episodes, which I watched mostly just because a bunch of friends kept saying they liked the show.  I could see why.  Season finale last year was great, and the season premiere last night just as good.  Check it out if you haven't, perhaps.  I didn't watch the Studio 60 premiere last night, but only because I watched it on YouTube a few weeks ago.  Looking forward to checking out the new episode next week, I think it's the show I'm most excited about this season.

Ignore the dots

I just came across a website trying to entice advertisers with this: "Our book review site attracts more than .4 million page views a year."

You see the decimal point?  Of course you do.  Who are they trying to fool?  Clearly, someone, since the way people who aren't trying to fool people write that number is 400,000.  Not a shabby number.  But, come on, that's ridiculous.  If I was causing any of those .4 million page views, after seeing that, I would stop visiting.  Unless they review my book positively, in which case I'll visit all the time, link to it, and delete this post.