20 Years in a Nutshell

I recently connected up with an old friend from high school on Facebook. After a couple reintroductory messages back and forth, he posed this question: "Take me on a brief tour of your life these past 20 years?" What follows is my attempt to answer that question...

OK, let's see. What's salient and interesting from the past 20 years of my life?

In 1988, without a lot of forethought, I went off to college in Binghamton. That place was suitably depressing and boring to ensure that I focused on studies and entertained myself with recreational drugs and just generally acting crazy. They had no photography classes, which was disappointing, but I found myself drawn to film and video classes, where we did all kinds of weird experimental art projects with film, video, and computers and learned almost NO skills that might be useful in the "film industry". By my third year of college I was already sick of being there, so I spent the first semester of my fourth year studying in Prague, then I graduated early, and then spent another 5 months living in a suburb of Paris.

Coming back to the US in the summer of 1992 I determined that the last thing I wanted to do was be in New York, in the part of the country where I had lived all my life (albeit, moving around the NY metro area a lot). So, I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico with a friend who was going to grad school there. The friendship only lasted about a year after that, but I stayed in New Mexico for 7 years.

Hmm, what did I do in NM? Worked some crappy jobs; realized I had to go back to school if I didn't want to continue doing that; dated an immature manic-depressive guy for waaaaay too long (6+ years); got a Master's degree in, essentially, interactive media; worked for DoD contractors; went to massage therapy school in the evenings for a year; took a lot more recreational drugs (thanks to the BF, who was big into self-medicating); explored a bit of the new age thing going on out there (determined that some of it is sincerely spiritual, and a lot of it is just another market used to exploit people's neediness); made some life-long friends of the very creative, very nerdy type; and then ultimately realized that the only way to end this back-and-forth no-future relationship with the crappy boyfriend was to just leave New Mexico (which I had always planned to do anyway). So in the summer of 1999 I moved back to New York.

Back in New York there was an internet bubble expanding, so I took my background in interactive media and got a job at EW.com (website of Entertainment Weekly) right before the bubble burst. It worked out ok tho, because we had a lean staff that was part of a huge multimedia conglomerate, so they had enough resources to keep us on, and they didn't care what we did. It was like working at a little startup with the resources of a media giant. I got to play with web pages, build metadata systems, and write comic book reviews and articles about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Do you remember our fellow classmate Rohanna? I lived with her for 3 years and then moved into my own place in the East Village.

Eventually the internet industry started to recover and then people (mainly AOL) did start to care about what we did at EW.com, and then it got kind of bureaucratic and boring. I stuck around for a couple more years, and then eventually moved on to being a consultant at [web consulting company]. This was a funny turn of events because when I first heard about that company, it was in 1999, in a Wired article about the two guys who ran the company, and I thought they kind of sounded like douchebags. Of course, a lot had changed since then, but I still never would have expected I'd someday be an employee of that company. Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the past 2+ years.

Hmm, that's a lot about work. My career has been pretty interesting, though. I've been writing and speaking about the Semantic Web for a while, and despite not being a particularly technical person I've built sort of a reputation and I've got the ear of some of the major people in the field, when I want it. So that's pretty fun.

I'd say that my life since moving back to NYC has been characterized by working and doing lots and lots of cultural things. In addition to the web and digital whatnot, I love to experience film festivals, comic conventions, museums, theater, live comedy, public art and mischief. This is why I can't see myself being in any place other than NYC. I also used to go see a lot of live music, but I kind of lost interest in that a couple years ago. Believe it or not, it's a lot of work to keep up with what's going on in the music scene.

Well, that's a lot of words, but I think that's about as brief as I can make a 20 year synopsis, and still have it make sense and be entertaining. How did I do?

Street Theater & Comedy

Street Theater
Originally uploaded by Mirka23

I left my apartment this evening and saw a crowd of people with umbrellas standing on the corner, watching a perfermonance by two people wrapped in cellophane. Someone actaully told me that this has been a regular occurance on that corner for a while now, but I forget who it is that's behind this street show.

I was actually on my way to the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater to see a show called Shut Up! I Hate You! It's sort of a pop culture/current events round table hosted by Scott Brown (a hilarious guy that I used to work with) and Anthony King. The two of them also co-wrote Gutenberg! The Musical! which I think is simply brilliant. Hmm, I just noticed that they seem to like show titles with multiple exclamtion points...

Anyway, I had never seen Shut Up! before but it sounded like the kind of thing I would enjoy. It was very, very funny. It's hard to be specific, because it was pretty free-form. They showed video clips and then the panel - consisting of the two hosts plus Jason Mantzoukas, John Mulaney, Rebecca Drysdale and Josh Tyrangiel (Managing Editor of Time.com) - would comment, discuss, make jokes, do impersonations, go on wild tangents, crack up, interrupt each other, etc and it was thoroughly entertaining. The next time they do this will be end of August, I'll have to go check it out again.

After the show I ran into Charlie Todd (his weekly improv smackdown show, Cage Match, was up next). I happened to be wearing my Improv Everywhere shirt, and he seemed to approve of that.

Shakespeare in the Park: Romeo & Juliet

On Sunday I went to see Romeo & Juliet, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. This is an annual summer tradition. My friends and I pick a weekend day, go to the park at an absurdly early hour, and wait for free tickets. We bring blankets, food, games and books and the time usually flies by.

This time we got the best seats we've ever had - second row! Lauren Ambrose was Juliet and the role of Romeo was played by Oscar Isaac (who was in Two Gentleman of Verona a couple summers ago). I thought they were both fabulous. In all the times I've seen R&J, in one form or another, I have never been so highly aware of how much Juliet escalated the impetuous romance.

The set was this amazing rotating thing, filled with water in the middle, and a giant configurable arching stairway that I can't adequately describe. It was quite wonderful, but also kind of noisy when it was turning. This was a little distracting when they turned it while someone was speaking, but not too bad if they turned it between scenes.

A note for Brian, one of the few people I know who reads this blog regularly - Go see Lauren Ambrose in this play! Skip work if you have to!! I won't tell anyone :)

Frost/Nixon

Tonight I went to see the play Frost/Nixon, and it was great despite numerous logistical problems with the production. At first I thought they were just making some weird lighting choices, but then they stopped the play and announced that there were technical problems. Michael Sheen did an amazing job of picking the scene back up again several minutes later, but the spell was broken a little and I think the audience was a little less engaged after the interruption. Sirens in Times Square were going off endlessly during what was supposed to be a silent, pensive scene. People were fidgety. The spotlight had a weird tendency to suddenly shift away from the person on stage and point straight down onto the audience below. Oh and some jackass's phone starting ringing (ringtone: "When the saints come marching in") during the dramatic final monologue. It continued through the end of the monologue and into the next scene. It went on for so long that other jackasses started shouting "shut it off!" (as if that helped).

Still, as I said, the play was really amazing. Plus, when we left, we saw Matthew Fox standing outside talking to some friends. Unless he just likes to hang out outside the Jacobs Theatre, I'm guessing he saw the play, too.