All summer, I've been wasting my Sunday afternoons in the shady bits of Prospect Park. There's nowhere more shady—in every sense of the word—than the peculiar little corner known as the Vale of Cashmere. For Narratively, producer Emily Kwong and I dug into the Vale's history, for a short piece on WNYC.
If you liked it, thank Emily. She's a genius. I just like to talk.
The Warner Brothers adaptation of Winter's Tale was filming in Park Slope yesterday. Doing a really half-assed impression of a journalist, I was wearing out some shoe leather—read: on a walk—and got the scoop—read: saw a bunch of horses.
Mark Helprin's novel is a favorite of my dad's, and I rather like it too. It's an odd book, spanning about 130 years of New York history, and getting into all manner of magic realism. It totally falls in on itself at the end—I think there's an apocalypse?—but it's worth a read, if only for the beautiful picture it paints of Victorian New York. Happily, I think that's the section of the story that the film is restricting itself to. Way to show restraint, Hollywood!
Since the book is packed full of temporal mingling, and starts with a famous passage about a riderless horse, seeing men with mutton chops on Prospect Park West making conversation with women in cowboy boots—with horses all around—was an ideal way to encounter the film. No need to see it now, so I totally just saved myself $12.
Because I'm too cheap to have an iPhone, I took some pictures with my Rumor Touch, a purple phone that takes terrible pictures. Seriously, you shouldn't even look at these pictures. They're awful.
I'm sorry.
Front page art courtesy Brendan Leach.
