A few hours ago I emerged from the subway, weary but very much excited as I just returned from the Evolver Town Hall Meeting at St. Mark’s Church. Evolver, as defined on their website, is a gathering of people who belong to the regenerative culture of the future, being born here and now. How I’d translate that is a gathering of people emerging from the post-modern, new age culture seeking meaning and purpose beyond hedonism and the “I’m OK, you’re OK” mentality. I did not see energy crystals, affirmation mirrors or pet rocks shaped like hearts at the Town Hall Meeting and thank God! What I did encounter were bright, inquisitive individuals, interested in topics such as complimentary currency, permaculture and collective consciousness. Both guests and speakers alike were genuinely interested in change and how we can make a positive difference individually and collectively.
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Tags:
Bee Spiritual,
Bright Green Movement,
collective consciousness,
Daniel Pinchbeck,
Douglass Rushkoff,
Evolver,
Evolver Town Hall Meeting,
Life Inc.,
No Impact Man,
Spirituality,
St. Mark's Church,
Time Interchange of NY
I blogged recently about the Broadway Impact: Action = Equality rally and how I was deeply touched by the stories shared by Cynthia Nixon, David Hyde Pearce and a slew of other notable individuals. Upon leaving the rally I truly believed I was capable of making a difference and taking action. Marriage Equality, whether you are for it or against it, is the civil rights movement of this generation and as history has proven time and time again, injustice does not last forever. In the war for marriage equality, there have been steps in the right direction… (Iowa, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut) and steps in the wrong direction… (California Supreme courts upheld Prop8) and we have only just begun!
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Tags:
Ana Ortiz,
Astoria,
Broadway Impact,
George Oronato,
Marriage Equality,
paulinator,
write to your senator
Empirical Study: My Dating Advice is Anathema…To Most!
Here’s what people have been saying about my old column, Holding Hans with Brian Hansbury:
- “Your column here smacks of western white male fantasy. Not only is it racist, but misogynist as hell.”
- “It may only be one woman’s opinion but I find Mr. Hansbury’s writing and commentary to be offensive and juvenile. When I read his piece about “lying”…I was so disturbed I could barely get through it.”
- “i can’t believe you managed to work in a reference to john cage in your fart story. you get a gold star for that.” - Someone Who Totally Gets It
Though I choose to interpret all three of those comments strictly as high praise, my dating column is over. I’m burnt out. And I made up all those questions I answered. Plus, I don’t really go on a lot of dates (If you hadn’t already, now would be a great time to question my journalistic integrity).
Like Jesus or even Madonna, I Re-Invent Myself!
What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I really and truly think I could be a pretty good POTUS. I’m smart, compassionate and a good leader. And sure I’ve closed a lot of doors for myself over the years, and while the door to professional sports stardom was closed, some say, at my birth, the door to the presidency remains open. When Obama was elected, a lot of black people were fond of saying, with a tear in their eye, how now they could say to their grandson, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up, even the President,” and really mean it for the first time. But what everyone seems to forget is that George W. Bush already accomplished this. As of the 2000 election it was really and truly possible for anyone, even a dumb, stupid, coked up and retarded white person, to be POTUS.
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Tags:
Coneheads,
court,
Hansdled The People's Court,
Robots,
sotomayor,
US Supreme
Aperitivo, Dell'anima
My friend recommended we go to Dell’Anima to check out their aperitivo offering, which runs from 4-6pm on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in the bar area. It’s based on the Italian tradition whereby so long as you are partaking in their drinks, you are welcome to partake in some of the appetizer offerings they have available. We went on a Friday around 4:40pm. The bar was full, but not packed with patrons behind the occupied seats. I was a little disappointed that there was not more available this particular day. There was a dish filled with various types of olives and another with various grilled vegetables. Most of the glasses of wine were in the $11-15 range, with the specialty cocktails costing $12. Read more »
Tags:
Aperitivo,
Dell'anima,
Dish Buzz,
Fresh Pasta,
italian,
lara ruth,
Manhattan,
Village
Bottle Shock
It’s raining outside. And despite my best efforts to wish ridiculously hard for fair weather, it seems like the world of rain clouds and post-memorial day apocalypse is here to stay. As such, I’m a fan of bringing in the Summer with sweet dreams of where I could be instead of where I, in fact, am—broke, hanging out on my couch with my sister and newly acquired flatmate (the bearded-wonder boyfriend of hers), sipping some wine.
In honor of all my friends who actually spent Memorial Day doing fun and exciting things and who now wish to reminisce with me on moments lost (code for they ‘re broke too), this week’s film pick is Bottle Shock. Now, not every film that scores at Sundance scores with me. I’m certainly not the type to fall down the rabbit hole that is Robert Redford’s seal of approval. That said, Bottle Shock, Randall Miller’s short trip into the history of Napa Valley’s viniculture and oenology, gets my seal of approval right along with the rest of the Sundance crowd. Read more »
Tags:
alan rickman,
bottle shock,
bottle shock trailer,
chris pine,
eliza dushku,
freddy rodriguez,
napa valley,
wine
The Isamu Noguchi Museum is a singular haven within its industrial, Costco-dominated LIC neighborhood. The museum is comprised of an indoor studio featuring stone and metal sculptures mostly curated by the artist himself before he died, as well as a Japanese-inspired garden dotted with textured stones, a fountain and various trees and grasses. The museum offers a comprehensive guided tour that passes through both the garden and interior space and focuses on the duality of Isamu Noguchi’s identity and the impact this duality had on his work and world view. Noguchi, you see, was the illegitimate son of a Caucasian woman and a Japanese poet who all but ignored his blue-eyed son. It’s no surprise, then, that splits and contrasts would play a recurring theme in his work.
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Tags:
Art,
Isamu Noguchi Museum,
Long Island City,
sculpture
It has been officially confirmed while we in the media always knew it to be true– the media industry is the heaviest drinking class of professionals according to the UK’s Guardian.
Apparently, media workers consume the equivalent of more than four bottles of wine/19pints of beer a week, double what is the recommended limit. They overshadow the next heaviest drinking professionals– IT workers.
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Tags:
Drinking,
Guardian,
media,
media professionals,
UK
The other day a friend of mine went to see Sessions. I asked her how she liked it and she said, “I didn’t expect it to be so heavy. I guess when I saw “musical” I expected “light”. Huh.
Comedy Tonight!
As a life long devotee to Sondheim, who’s every musical (even the deceptively named Follies) is filled with some combination of longing, regret, despair, confusion, anger, revenge, lethargy, emptiness, callousness, greed, murder, mental illness, and scorn, the last thing I tend to expect from a musical is “light”. Even the first song from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (”Comedy Tonight”) takes the time to tell you what you will NOT see: NO ROYAL CURSE, // NO TROJAN HORSE, // AND A HAPPY ENDING, OF COURSE! // GOODNESS AND BADNESS, // MAN IN HIS MADNESS, // THIS TIME IT ALL TURNS OUT ALL RIGHT! // TRAGEDY TOMORROW! // COMEDY TONIGHT! as if to caution “If you’ve come here for the typical Sondheim fare you’ll be disappointed by all the jubilation!” Of course Sondheim is brilliant in any mood, so there’ no fear of disappointment, it’s just rarely does a musical start off with the disclaimer WARNING … HAPPY ENDING AHEAD!
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Tags:
Busby Berkeley,
Camelot,
carousel,
Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum,
Gigi,
Gypsy,
King and I,
musicals,
Rent,
Sondheim,
Sound of Music,
South Pacific,
theatre,
Theatre Buzz,
West Side Story
Happy Summer, everyone! For once, New York One’s terribly wrong 10-day forecast was a good thing, right?
So, I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and some people have e-mailed me, wondering A) if I simply stopped writing for the blog or B) had my mom shipped me off to the woods these past few weeks.
Well, no on both counts, but if I could do the latter all over again, this time I’d do it with a smile.
While I was away, however, Julie Kraut’s Slept Away dragged me down Memory Lane’s dirty, rocky path. I was once again forced to weigh the leftover camp mush I could never finish at mealtime; I relived that moment in group swim when I learned what else to shave aside from legs and pits; and I was reintroduced to the strangeness of real life out-of-towners. All this, I remembered with a smile.
But for Slept Away’s Laney Parker, a summer at Camp Timber Trails is nothing to smile about.
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Tags:
Julie Kraut,
Slept Away,
summer camp,
Young adult
To quote the great (and surprisingly missing) pop diva, Christina Aguilera’s song What a Girl Wants:
Say if you love something let it go
If it comes back, it’s yours
That’s how you know
It’s for keeps yeah, it’s for sure
Well, maybe not. You see, I set Hot Bartender free for an entire month and lo and behold, he came back to me. His initial text message after my month of sobriety came as a shock to me and I thought for a second things could work out between the two of us. When we finally met outside of the bar for our walk around the town, I felt like we made progress. Then when I saw him twice following our rendezvous in two different places of work, I still felt good about our situation. Congrats to the Paulinator, for it seems something was going right in the romance department. That was until I saw Hot Bartender macking with other guys.
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Tags:
Action = Equality,
Broadway Impact,
Cynthia Nixon,
Gay Marriage,
hot bartender,
Marriage Equality Bill,
paulinator
