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They're currently filming scenes for Spiderman 3 two blocks from my apartment–more info on Flickr .

Brooklyn neighborhood names are notoriously difficult to identify. Sometimes it's because they're rarely used (who wants to identify their neighborhood as Gravesend ?) or rarely used anymore (Flatbush seems to have once been a popular term for a large swath of neighborhoods that now go by other names). Other times people knowingly identify themselves as a resident of a surrounding neighborhood that's more desirable than their own (Manhattan Beach creeps into Sheepshead Bay, Sheepshead Bay creeps into Brighton Beach). The best example of neighborhood creep is the insistence of people who live on 4th Ave to call it Park Slope. It's not. If you live further south on 4th Ave you're in Sunset Park; if you live around the Gowanus canal on 4th Ave then you're in Gowanus (or if you're a bit north you could get away with Boerum Hill , which is after all is a gentrified name for Gowanus). Real estate agents are notoriously bad when it comes to this, as Adam and I exp...

This week's New Yorker contains a series of letters/emails/personal essays written by soldiers who were stationed in Iraq who participated in the National Endowment for the Arts's Operation Homecoming project. While there's a 30 minute flash media clip on the New Yorker 's website, the plain-old text isn't, unfortunately. I tend to think of the war in Iraq as an abstraction, as something representative of a larger problem in the world. The Operation Homecoming project is a powerful reminder that there are several hundred thousand Americans and millions of Iraqis who don't have the luxury of abstractions.

Form passed along a link to this article on why the Mavs have been a better team without Steve Nash; basketball sabermetrics is apparently in vogue nowadays. While this year's NBA Finals has the makings for domestic unrest, Sheryl (born and raised in south Florida) seems happy enough to back Dallas along with me. I don't know whether this is out of kindness towards me or a fascination a with improbably large Germans .

When you’re not in a tiny space like Bowery Ballroom, where even in the worst seat in the house you can see the snarls and sweat onstage, then the concert experience is just as much about the crowd’s reaction to the music as the music itself. For me, anyway, a great crowd makes a show memorable and a meh crowd makes me wish I had danced around my apartment with the CD at full blast, instead. I’ve seen Pearl Jam twice now—once in 1996 at Lockheart Stadium in Florida (the year of the Ticketmaster fiasco) for the No Code tour, and again last night at the Continental Airlines Arena in New Jersey as a birthday present from Jeff. Both times, my seats were very good, but not “I can see Eddie Vedder’s blue eyes” close. But because Pearl Jam has that special sparkle quality—not in the “ohmigod, Pearl Jam effing RULES, man” way (well…maybe a LITTLE bit in that way), but the combination of their huge, stellar catalogue and fanbase—both shows were scream-out-loud fantastic. Last night, we were on...