It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...

My new website: TA DA

New Year, New Glasses

First things first: Here's a photo of me in my new glasses. They were designed by Frenchman Cyril Dray of I See GB in Great Barrington and manufactured by Zip+Homme in Japan. I've been wearing them for a couple of weeks now and like them very much, even if they're not magic like my much-lamented former green pair.

My family didn't warm to them until we toured the Sol LeWitt wall drawing retrospective at MASS MoCA. We were taking in LeWitt's middle period work, the drawings with the softer geometry and vibrant, not yet screaming color, and Annalena turned to me and said, "You know Mom, your glasses are starting to grow on me." Dave looked around the gallery, "Yes, they make sense here."

They seem to be preaching to the choir of good glasses lovers glasses rather than ones that promote world peace by uniting all of humanity with their mystical rightness. So be it. I'm grateful that I can see and that my little New England town is home to such an excellent eyewear shop.

I'm in professional limbo at the moment, having recently drafted a proposal for a new publishing project and waiting to hear what my agent thinks of it. I hate waiting, but love being at a beginning again.

I want to keep the sense of uncharted territory and freshness going with this blog as it enters year two. The more people read my blog (8859 visitors in '08), the harder it becomes to stay loose with it, but that's the key.

And since this is my blog where nobody's the boss of me except me and, as many editors have noticed, I don't care much about formal transitions...

Dave and I met on January 3, 1989 at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and moved in together three weeks later. I remember telling a friend at the time that our blazing romance was "not trivial." Here we are 20 years down the road. It's a miracle and a mystery.

My heart goes out to Ericka Lutz, whose marriage in many ways seems to have mirrored my own. Her husband, Bill Sonnenschein, died unexpectedly over the holidays and she wrote this incredible blog post about it. I don't know how she found the strength and clarity to write it...except that I do...words are solace.

Blast from the Past: Mother Jones Magazine

Whenever I hear Des'ree's "You Gotta Be" on the radio, I think of Eric Gupton who, circa 1993-94, used to sing that song to me in the Mother Jones mail room. I was the assistant to the publisher of the magazine then and Eric was office manager by day, and by night, as San Francisco Chronicle theater critic Steven Winn says in the linked tribute above, he was a "flamboyant warrior" founding member of the audacious Pomo Afro Homos theater troupe.

That era has been on my mind this week because after a few months of lurking, I recently left a comment on David Weir's blog. I stumbled on David's blog as both he and I listed "investigative reporting" as an interest on our blogger profiles. Only 28 blogs link to this interest vs. 13,400 when you click the interest "chocolate." I don't remember having many conversations with David at the magazine (he was an editor), but I do recall that he treated me with kindness and respect, which was rare and distinctly endearing in those days. Reading his San Francisco blog has felt like visiting home.

Then last night the publisher of Mother Jones, who remarkably is still the publisher of the magazine, sent me a friend request on Facebook. I was surprised as I've only seen him once since quitting 13 years ago. I've thought of him with compassion in recent years, though, as I've dealt with various arrogant, ambitious, judgmental, impatient-for-glory assistants.

While I did have some legitimate gripes about working at Mother Jones...like that it was an insular largely Ivy league club (I once overheard the editor in chief tell an earnest intern that the most important thing to achieve success in journalism is who you go to school with), like that I was the only mother working there, like that free speech was championed everywhere except in the office...in retrospect, I must have been a bit of a terror as an assistant. I now have a great deal more sympathy for my former boss and look forward to reading his Facebook status reports.

Let the healing begin.

Book Launch 2.0

This video by Dennis Cass is funny and all too true.