Monthly Archives: April 2012

Roll v. Wade

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Bowling: Good!  Lack of affordable reproductive healthcare for women: BAD! This weekend was the NYAFF Bowl-a-Thon, where 200 pro-choice New Yorkers got down to business and raised over $70,000 to give underprivileged women across the city access to essential reproductive health and counseling services they would not otherwise be able to afford. At a time when women’s rights are increasingly (maliciously and inexplicably) coming under fire, when women are being demonized for wanting comprehensive health care, it feels good to do something that actually has a tangible result. Maude Lebowski would be proud. Stellar team names included: Plan Bees, The Morning After Pins, and (universal favorite) Roll v. Wade. Our team, Ladies of the Lane, dressed as Spanish senoritas, raised $2,743, and collectively knocked down all of the pins over ten times.  Feels good, looks good.

Infinite thanks to everyone’s support support so far, and, hey! We’re still accepting donations! Check it out (and get more info) here.

Nobody mess with the Jesus. Or my awesome teammates:

Lebowski image from here.

And We’re Off!

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Ta Ta For Now, dear ones! Sweetheart and I are heading to tropical locales, turquoise waters, and sweet funky and spicy rum cocktails. So, I’ll bid you adieu for a bit…

In my absence and in the spirit of adventure, exploration, wanderlust, and the ever quickening pulses we’re all feeling due to the rising temperatures of summer, please enjoy a MIXTAPE I made you guys. A Feather by Feather first, this one is meant to be played with the windows down, wherever you are and wherever you’re going. It’s called Breezes Kiss Collarbone. Click to download and please share! Besos!

awesome porsche image from here.

Gremolata & Cancellaresca Milanese

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Though I’m not too well versed in it, I love typography. Borrowing from illuminated manuscripts, morphing from baroque curlicues to the lazy S’s of the Virginia Gazette (headline to the uninitiated: The Frefest advice, Foreign and Domeftick), from the ubiquity of Helvetica to the transgressions of Comic Sans. My love of fonts is pretty basic and visceral, my knowledge of custom running type limited to when my Mama had a font made of her handwriting in the mid 90′s (awesome). But, when I stumbled on this kickstarter campaign, my eyes fluttered. A brand new typeface. Bold and Italics not just header buttons on command. Languid, tilty, romantic italic letters paired off with their stand-up roman bretheren based on exact harmony between letter and meaning. Type made in the oldest way, in a foundry, painstaking, precise, hand wrought. Marvelous. The finished typeface will be a marriage of Cancellaresca Milanese (a typeface based on one that first appeared in Milan in 1541 in the books of Giovanni Antonio Castiglione) and Gremolata (a newly designed type with a slightly larger set of capitals based on those in the Cancellaresca, and paired with a lower case that is inspired, but not based on, Alpine typefaces of the mid-sixteenth century). Of course. the I gave $10, the project is funded, and the boys have started carving out their type. Just as in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king, in the kingdom of Kickstarter, even the pauper is a patron. Here, the type:

Getting The Spirit

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Up several flights of stairs into a small but airy blue sanctuary with high windows, the singing hasn’t started, but the drums and organ are warming up, seats full and pews stocked with paper fans from the local funeral home. Needless to say, getting the spirit raises temperatures. Amen. This Saturday I met Carrie up in Harlem for the fourth annual gospel choir festival at the Elmendorf Reformed Church. Our friend Laura was singing, the proceeds went to autism research, and the noise promised to be joyous unto the lord and anyone else who might be listening. The church itself (now in its fifth home uptown) was founded 350 years ago, and, as the MC Elder Kevin Spooner said “it feels like some of us have been here that long”. Amen. Four choirs. Organ, piano, bass, drums.The crowd instructed to sing out if the spirit moved us, and moved we were. And afterwards, we waltzed out into the warm Saturday Harlem night to Sylvia’s for fried chicken. Amen.

Heart Art

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I am in love love love with this Molly Ledbetter painting. Deep Dark Secret Confession: I’m one of those boring poopers who usually prefers when art is a picture of something. Like a horse or a ship or a faith healing. I probably would have been gasping and “well-I-never!”-ing at the 1913 Armory Show. Yet even though dear miss Molly’s work is large scale, graphic, and abstract, it’s also deliciously tactile, lovely and compelling, with riotous pops and swags of color and I just love it. She’s got a marvelous new site (and a great blog to boot). Now if I could only decide which piece is my favorite…

Aim for the Rainbow

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These are the hand drying instructions at one of our all-time favorite restaurants, Grand Sichuan in Bay Ridge. Since the chengdu spicy and aromatic fish is so hot and sichuan pepper tingly, and it is our wont to have water, tea, tsingtao, and coke classic on the table at all times, I’ve seen this a lot. I love it every time. I take the instructions as follows:

Throw an arrow from your wrist at a rainbow while wearing short shorts.

I’m gearing up to do a bunch of projects this weekend (involving paint, gravel, chalk, mulch, and beer) I can’t wait to share!

Mother Mayo

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Two things. 1) a store has opened up four blocks from my house that ONLY SELLS MAYONNAISE and 2) Last Sunday they had their grand opening and were giving away deviled eggs AND champagne for free and somehow I didn’t hear about it until today. Mayonnaise something wrong with that.

Empire Mayonnaise makes mayonnaise from scratch on site in their tiny storefront using exotic formulations and flavors- black garlic, white truffle, or preserved lemon here, emu or ostrich eggs in lieu of standard chicken eggs there. My love of mayo is no secret, but this could be dangerous.

Empire Mayonnaise
564 Vanderbilt Ave.
(btw. Dean and Bergen)

images from the source.

Sayings of a Jewish Buddah

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My Mama sent this along, equal parts bad cocktail party joke and it’s-so-simple-it-just-may-be-the-ultimate-truth brilliance:

Sayings of a jewish buddah: Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Trying to live it. Shantih Shalom.

 
ps. isn’t that just what a jewish buddah would look like?

pps. big doins in the backyard, the JB and I drove to Westchestah yesterday to pick up a long wooden trestle table with benches…for free! Will keep posted. In the meantime, stay zen.

 

New York, I Love You

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This weekend we have dear friends visiting from down south, a pair of bon vivant and raconteur travelers who’ve found themselves in the flats of Iowa, the mountains of Virginia, and the deep pines of Athens, Georgia- all for the pursuit of knowledge. Though they live among the rolling country hills right now, the countdown is on for the end of their bucolic tenure and their subsequent carbetbag transatlantic move to London. There couldn’t be a better time to show them our New York. She’s tricking herself out in flowers and opening her arms as she always does for spring wanderers. And, in making plans for their arrival, I’m reminded that the best way to fall back in love with your own city is to show off her best sides to someone you love.

On the docket:  Sichuan in Bay Ridge, a visit to MoMa, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and a brown bag picnic at the carousel, dinner at Roman’s, The first session of the Brooklyn Flea back outdoors, the opening of the Dekalb Market, Passover Seder with Sweetheart’s family, lunch at Spumoni Gardens, a trip to Coney Island to ride the soon-to-be-closed-Sweetheart’s-childhood-favorite Eldorado AutoSkooter Bumper Cars, A trek either to Arthur Avenue or to Staten Island for Italian delights, and Michael Daves at Rockwood.

Chag sameach, thank you New York, and may everyone have a marvelous weekend.

 

Gorgeous top image: Ernst Haas, Central Park, Spring, 1970
from the awesome ICP photography blog.