As I'm sure you already knew...

I find these among the more annoying words out there, because they usually precede some remarkable fact that you had absolutely no possible way of knowing. So...

As I'm sure you already knew, I'm moving. In fact, I've moved.

* * *

Well, it's not a huge shock, I hope, because I've been dropping hints, and I've let a few of you know in person. But it has happened. I'm no longer in London. It's something of an identity crisis for the blog, because it started as a New Yorker moves to London adventure. But we've migrated away from that for a while now, so I think we can survive, can't we?

* * *

I wanted to make a better announcement, with some very clever insights about London versus New York, tie it all up with a bow, but in some ways I'm pleased I did not or could not. I would rather like this blog to meander along in whatever direction it will go.

* * *

And to the new (temporary?) name: bbNY. Several interpretations here: Bombay Beauty (back in) New York. Partly true. But I will also have another foot in Boston. And so my own thinking was: bombay boston new york or bbNY.

You've come with me this far. I hope you'll take the next steps with me as well.

xoxo

BB

A year!

Gentle reader,

It passed quietly, without a cake or champagne, but it's been a year and counting now for this little blog. I feel that I should provide some grand overview, some vision of life, and actually I have some long overdue, big (big!) announcements. I'll postpone the last, and don't really have the others, but then I'll mark a year this way.

These are the films I watched at home this year, an unedited list. You'll notice the list starts in August, that's when I started my Love Film subscription (like Netflix for you Americans). Yes, I'm willing to confess that I rented The 40 Year-Old Virgin. Yes, I'm a little embarrassed. Does this list prove that I've wasted my evenings when I could have been doing something more productive, e.g., saving the world, stopping global warming? Yes, perhaps. But the list embodies growth and expansion for me: growth of my aesthetic horizons, each film is like a tree ring, in itself meaningless but important to mark the passage of time.

I hope we, you and I, blogger and reader, have more journeys and growth together over the next year.

xoxo

BB

A year in film
The Decalogue, Volume 1, June 12 2008.
All that Jazz, 11th June 2008
The Seventh Seal 29th May 2008
The Wind That Shakes The Barley 29th May 2008
Ivan's Childhood 21st May 2008
Dirty Pretty Things 3rd May 2008
Last Year At Marienbad 30th Apr 2008
Autumn Sonata 18th Apr 2008
Little Dieter Needs to Fly 15th Apr 2008
Ikiru 26th Mar 2008
The Silence 12th Mar 2008
Wild Strawberries 27th Feb 2008
That Obscure Object of Desire 2nd Feb 2008
Secret Ceremony 2.5 19th Jan 2008
Yojimbo 17th Jan 2008
Dirk Bogarde - Accident 15th Jan 2008
Dirk Bogarde - The Sleeping Tiger 1st Apr 2008
Dirk Bogarde - The Servant 14th Feb 2008
Fanny And Alexander 10th Dec 2007
The Final Days Documentary - Marilyn Monroe 21st Nov 2007
Days Of Heaven 17th Nov 2007
Scenes From A Marriage 16th Nov 2007
Easy Rider 7th Nov 2007
Sanjuro 6th Nov 2007
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 26th Oct 2007
L'Eclisse 23rd Oct 2007
Raging Bull 23rd Oct 2007
Persona 17th Oct 2007
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets 16th Oct 2007
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban 21st Sept 2007
Jules Et Jim 20th Sept 2007
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire 18th Sept 2007
Some Like It Hot 12th Sept 2007
Seven Samurai 10th Sept 2007
Blow Up 28th Aug 2007
Children Of Men 21st Aug 2007
La Dolce Vita 21st Aug 2007
40 Year-Old Virgin 16th Aug 2007

Another Swedish singer

Is it me or is it the Swedes?



And one more...




And if you think this is a waste of time. I refer you to the complaint department.

xoxo

BB

YSL

I was sitting in Le café de Flore on Monday, sipping a chablis on a surprisingly warm, wet, and indecisive day, trying not to stare at a woman who looked remarkably like Kristin Scott Thomas and probably was (though I haven't given her much thought before she looked effortlessly elegant in a very YSLish safari suit). Next to me were two older women, old friends and regulars. The waiter greeted them warmly, evidently not having seen them for some time; I've moved to St. Tropez one of them informed him as they continued with their teatime snack.

Where else in Paris can tourists and natives blend so easily, one ignoring but charming, the other oblivious? Perhaps assuming I could not follow their conversation the old friends chatted on and on, grabbing things from my table as though I weren't there, overflowing with cups and plates from their table to the bench. I wasn't bothered, and did my best to maintain the disinterested but observant expression that the natives seem to adopt.

I was in a reverie, enjoying half understanding the conversations around me (so much better than catching all or nothing), when a newspaper seller burst in announcing the special edition for the passing of Yves St. Laurent. It was a moment, a passing, but perhaps then approrpriately received in this city where such events merit special editions and a collective introspection (the end of an era - what was that era? what is this era?)

It was an era in which it was French fashion, French food, French passion that inspired the world. Perhaps that era was itself a coda, the long and tumultuous end after the end of another truly great era. Perhaps. But she is still elegant, beautiful in this periphery of vision.

BB

The Bird

I can all ready hear the groans. Why and from whom? Because for the last several months I have been complaining to anyone who would listen that I am being persecuted by a bird. I thought initially it was several birds, Hitchcock style, but have now concluded it is one solitary irresponsible bird. This early bird, for that's what he is, starts to sing between 4.15 and 4.45 every morning, though usually much closer to the latter time. After doing his think for a few minutes he goes back to sleep, leaving me wide awake and unable to sleep. The first few times it was charming and I didn't mention it to anyone. The I did a small blog entry. But after six weeks of missing the tail end of my sleep I couldn't take it anymore. I began wearing earplugs to sleep. By and large this works, but sometimes this bird wakes me up through the earplugs.

You see? You don't believe me do you? I've tried to record it, but you've got to imagine it 10 times louder - or more precisely piercing.


Aren't birds adorable little fluffy creatures? By and large they do appear to be. But recall that the genetically closest living descents of dinosaurs have been show to be birds.

Blogus in extremis

I have been reading a lengthy cover article in the New York Times Magazine by Emily Gould, who at one time wrote for the gossipy-snarky New York media blog called Gawker. It's worth a look for any of us who write blogs, not because I agree with most of her thoughts or share her experiences or because we'll end up where she did (don't worry, not jail!), but because of how the early steps of this de/ascent to purgatory were so normal and gradual, the kind of thing each of us has probably experienced a little bit as well.





A few choice extracts:

Back in 2006, I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and ... almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As... one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

... But is that really what’s making people blog? After all, online, you’re not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you.

After the first night [after my breakup] ... I woke up as the sun rose and sat down at my desk to write a post that was nominally about a recent New York Times article about the shelf-life of romantic love. My boyfriend and I had just broken up, I revealed, and so I had been wondering whether love really exists. I wrote that I had concluded that it does. We can’t expect other people to make us happy, I informed my readers with total sincerity and earnestness, and we should live in the moment and stop obsessing about the future...I shudder involuntarily when I read this post now. It’s like stumbling across a diary I kept as a teenager. It’s probably one of the worst things that I’ve ever written. The commenters loved it.

Gawker had recently added a counter beside each post that displayed how many views it received. Now it was easy to see exactly how many people cared about my feelings. The site’s owner didn’t like my “I believe in love” post, he told me, but he said he was O.K. with it because, as everyone could see, more than 10,000 people disagreed with him. Readers e-mailed me their own breakup horror stories and posted hundreds of comments, advising me about flavors of ice cream to eat, and I reveled in the attention. I had managed to turn my job into a group therapy session. “Emily, I don’t really know you any more than I know the people I see every morning walking the dogs,” one of them wrote. “It’s more of an imagined familiarity born out of reading your words for a year. But that took guts, all the way around. And I’m in your corner, inasmuch as a somewhat anonymous, faceless, nameless commenter can be.”

All of this does make me think how grateful I am for the few but loyal readers of this blog. Group hug!

Love you all,

xoxo

BB

Portrait of a lady

“You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
[For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!
How keen you are!]
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you—
Without these friendships—life, what cauchemar!”

T.S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady, inspired by this wonderful portrait -- and in this case I do urge you to take this quotation out of the context of the original poem!

BB