What’s Christmas without The Chieftains?
Black Friday in New York
Continuing the adventures in New York City! On Black Friday, we didn’t do much by the way of shopping until late. First up was one of two things that had been on my Must-Do list: Visit the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. This was indulging the Little Kid Space Nerd in me, I fully admit! And imagine what flitted through my heart when we walked in and saw the Hayden Sphere looming above:
Such a fascinating place — all the displays about things that I’ve been interested in for almost literally as long as I can remember.
Fascinatingly, those planet models are to scale: If the Hayden Sphere is the size of the sun, then that’s how big the planets are. There’s another series of walking displays around the lower perimeter, showing the size of increasingly tiny things: If the Hayden Sphere is the size of a single raindrop, then this is how big a common cold virus is — that sort of thing. This whole place was amazing.
The upper portion of the sphere itself is the Planetarium, where we saw a show about dark energy, narrated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson himself. I could sit through a dozen planetarium shows in one day, to be quite honest. It was our great luck that the Planetarium had just reopened after several months downtime for refitting: the dome was rebuilt to make the seams between the sections almost invisible, and the seats and projection systems were upgraded. To my surprise, there was no Big Bug-Eyed Projector sitting in the middle of the planetarium, which is a traditional fixture of such places (this kind of thing, if you’re wondering what I’m talking about). Projection seems to be handled from a series of projectors along the boundaries of the planetarium. The show was amazing and very well-done. There’s another theater in the lower half of the Sphere, but we didn’t attend that one. Instead we moved on to the rest of the museum.
Much of the museum is dedicated to the kinds of taxidermy-based diorama displays that I’m sure we all remember from our youths. This museum’s dioramas are some of the best I’ve ever seen, but in all honesty, a little of that kind of thing tends to go a long way with me. There were still some cool things to see, though.
We spent some time in the Hall of Gems and Minerals, because rocks are cool, dammit.
That last is pretty fascinating: it’s a piece of a much larger meteorite, about the size of a small car — and it weighs 34 tons. That blew my mind. The signage illustrates the engineering problems they faced just displaying the thing in the Museum: it sits on support posts that extend down through the basement floor all the way to bedrock.
After the museum, it was time for another touristy stop: Rockefeller Center.
And that place is every bit as gorgeous as it looks on teevee and in the pictures.
Watching people skate at Rockefeller Center is one of the most unexpectedly wonderful things that we saw on this trip. It was just…sheer, beautiful happiness, from the family that was skating together…
…to the young woman in the wonderful scarf who couldn’t let go of the rail.
After Rockefeller Center, it was off to find dinner. We wound up at a burger joint called 5 Napkin, where we had a terrific meal in a dining room made up to look like an old meat market:
And then, where else to go on a Friday Night in New York City than…TIMES SQUARE!!!
The coolest thing was that everywhere we went that day, nobody was pushy, nobody was in a bad mood. It was as if the thousands of people in our company were all just…happy. Even in Times Square, there was no shoving, no rancor…everybody was relaxed and having a good time. Everybody was. I’ve no idea if it’s always that way or if was just a function of the season (and the presence of cops everywhere), but this entire trip was almost entirely free of anxiety.
So ended our third night in New York City. Two nights remained….
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Symphony Saturday
I know, we missed this feature last week, but fret not! We’re back, with a work I didn’t even know existed until this very morning. It’s the Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Roma”, by Georges Bizet. It’s an interesting piece, with an interesting history. Bizet only lived until he was 36, and he wrote this symphony over an eleven-year period until he was 33, and by all reports, he was still unsatisfied with it and might have done more revision work on it had he not died. The work’s movements were never performed together during his lifetime, and because the symphony is generally viewed as a flawed and incomplete work, it is rarely performed today. But listening this morning, there is music of value here.
Here’s Bizet’s Second Symphony, “Roma”.
Next week we start looking at one of the greatest of all symphonists: Johannes Brahms!
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A Brief Trip Around Writing Blogistan
Here are some things that I’ve seen around the neighborhood of the Blogistan Writing Community:
- Briana Morgan released her first book, Blood and Water, a month or two back (I read several chapters of it in draft, and if the final version — which is on my To Read list — is as good, it’s a keeper), and now she is selling signed copies. (Note to self: Get off arse and start offering signed copies!)
- Ksenia Anske (whose site needs to be on your “Visit several times weekly” list now) has thoughts on how writers shoot themselves in the foot by not making their books discoverable.
- Shelly Muncaster has reasons for not doing NaNoWriMo. She makes an important point: NaNoWriMo might not be for you. If you’re genuinely vexed by it, there is zero shame in not participating! NaNoWriMo should be a source of fun and good work and camaraderie, not for beating oneself up.
- EJ Fisch discusses, amongst other things, how she has used her workspace in her day job as a way of marketing herself as a writer. This reminds me of something I read in a book years ago, which was assigned reading for a sales job I had. (I was terrible at it and eventually got fired, but that’s a tale for another time.) The guy writing the book discussed how he put his sales award certificates and photos of himself meeting various dignitaries on the wall behind his desk, so his prospects could see them as he talked with them. He was using his own walls as sales space. Always a good idea! I’m not sure how well I could do this sort of thing at my workplace — my own workspace is very tiny, with almost no wall space to speak of — but it’s worth thinking about.
- SK Waller (one of the first writing-peeps I ever met, over ten years ago, in the course of blogging!), had some observations on how trying NaNoWriMo impacted her own usual process. She’s not a plow-ahead-and-revise-later type of writer, so she had some trouble getting out of the block. (She did eventually win, though!)
That’s about all for now. Moving forward, I’ll try to do more of this sort of thing. Excelsior, Stardancers!
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Stuff!!!
No updates in a few weeks! But it’s been a really busy month. Here are some notes on recent antics in my world:
- Remember, THE WISDOMFOLD PATH is out! I haven’t finished the Nook formatting yet, but I hope to have that done in the next few days. Got you copy yet? No? GET WITH IT, PEOPLE!!!
- I redesigned Byzantium’s Shores, my personal blog. The old template was looking increasingly clunky in my eyes, so I finally cleaned it up a bit. Also, now that NaNoWriMo is over and the book is launched and whatnot, I should be able to post more reliably there.
- We took a vacation in New York City! That pretty much killed my writing time for six days, but I figured that would happen, so I accounted for it. I did get some work done on the trip, enough so as to not completely lose momentum. I’ve been posting photos of the trip to Flickr, with blog posts over on Byzantium’s Shores annotating the journey. Follow along!
- Regarding NaNoWriMo: I am now 2-2 in my NaNo participation: two wins each of the first two years, and two losses the last couple of years. Ouch! I expected this year to be tough, but I was pretty much on target right up until the last day or two before we embarked for NYC, so I feel pretty good that I would have made 50000 words with no problem had that trip not happened. And NaNoWriMo, as much as I love you and look forward to you each year, I love travel with my family more! (And besides, the whole point isn’t to beat yourself up about making 50K anyway. The point is to show prospective writers how the whole “goal-setting” thing works.)
- What’s up now? Well, this month there’s Christmas and the new Star Wars movie (which I continue to believe should have been released next May, because Star Wars movies should always come out in May), and it’s time to start revising Forgotten Stars III, which I can already safely say is going to be a lot harder than reworking the first two books. The first draft isn’t exactly a mess, but I’ve had time to think a lot about certain aspects of that book since I finished the draft, and…well, there’s a ton of heavy lifting ahead, so much so that I’m a little worried about making next November’s hopeful release date.
That’s about all for right this second. More stuff to come, though! I actually have some posts already written and awaiting their loading here. Stay tuned, Stardancers!
Excelsior!
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Thanksgiving in New York, continued
After the Parade dispersed, we went in search of something very pressing: a bathroom. Hey, we’d been standing there for five hours! We found a Starbucks. To my great disappointment, they spelled my name correctly on my cup.
Just across the street from Starbucks? This rather notable building.
Sadly, no Deborah Kerr running across the street, staring up at the building because it’s the closest thing to Heaven; no Tom Hanks running up there to find his son and Meg Ryan, either. And no giant gorilla. Just the Empire State Building, as beautiful a thing as I’ve ever seen.
Later on that night, we went to dinner. I had already made reservations the week before at a place called Senza Gluten, an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. (The Wife is celiac, so we always have to seek out gluten-free options for her. I’ve never minded this, because in truth, it’s led us to some really amazing food finds that we wouldn’t necessarily have discovered otherwise.) The place was tiny and rustic, and the food was wonderful. Yes, it was Thanksgiving, and yes, there was traditional turkey dinner on the menu. I had the chicken parm.
Upon leaving the restaurant, I had to walk into the middle of the street, because this is the view outside Senza Gluten’s front door, facing south:
One World Trade Center is actually a very impressive building, especially at night.
This night was amazingly beautiful. It had been in the low 60s during the day, and by now it was in the 50s, a perfect night for a stroll through Greenwich Village, on our way back to the 9th Street PATH Station…and then I spotted something lit up, bright and white, off in the distance. It turned out — and I honestly hadn’t even realized this until I saw it — that we were approaching Washington Square Park with that amazing, beautiful, famous arch.
We lingered here a bit, taking in the November air that felt like May, gazing upon the arch and reflecting upon the impromptu memorials left for the victims of the attacks in Paris.
After that we finally made our way back to the hotel, full and tired and happy and thankful.
The next day? That’s another post to come!
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Something for Thursday
I’ve featured this piece before, but here it is again, as I’ve just discovered that my favorite performance of it ever is on YouTube! It’s the Trumpet Concerto by Alexander Arutiunian, a Soviet/Armenian composer who only died a few years ago. This concerto just drips with Armenian folk flavor. I had this performance on a cassette for years, but never managed to locate it on CD. And now here it is, with Timofey Dokshitzer performing with the Bolshoi Orchestra. This is fiery stuff!