Category: Happiness

Mad Madness

Anyone who hasn’t already had five martinis today knows that Mad Men starts back up again this weekend. In a delightfully silly move our friends (who live just a few blocks away from Sterling Cooper’s fictional Madison avenue address) are throwing a costume/screening party to watch the season premier. Even though I’d normally jump at the chance to try and put my hair in a bouffant, since Sweetheart and I are pretty bohemian these days, I think we’re going to put on our best beatnik and roll with the horizontal stripes.

Since I won’t be exercising my right to hairspray and heels, I’ll have to live vicariously through the above picture of the Mad Men wardrobe room. Oh what I wouldn’t give for a “Supermarket Sweep” style romp in there. Just five minutes and a few fur stoles, thankyouverymuch. Check out the rest of the Mad Men behind-the-scenes shots from Rolling Stone here. Now somebody get me out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.

The 5:15’s

I’ve been in Virginia for a few days now, halfway down the great rolling coast en route to the spanish moss and still country of south Georgia. If I get within a hundred mile radius of my hometown on a Monday, I’ve gotta go sit in with “The 5:15’s”.

Each and every Monday, The 5:15’s meet at the “rock’n’roll office”. It used to be a dentists office my dad built and, left vacant two years ago in the recession, now it’s where people come to rock. The set up just lives there, the amazing accumulated wealth of years of gear: full drums, a wall of huge ancient speakers that still sound awesome, keyboards, multiple amps, mics, Fender tweeds, Rickenbacker 12 strings, pedal steels, SG’s and Les Pauls, electric fiddles and mandolins, my old acoustic guitar from high school, Stratocasters tuned to Keith Richards and and PRS’s hardly tuned at all, Precision and Jazz basses, and, of course, my mom on Cowbell.

It’s pretty amazing, I grew up knowing these guys, the doctor, the lawyer, the chef… and every Monday they shed skins and drink whiskey and play the songs they’ve always loved. There are the obvious classics: BADGE, Down By the River, Dead Flowers, Springsteen, The Byrds, Joe Cocker. Then there’s some more obscure stuff, Steve Earle, Delbert McClinton, Government Mule. If you want to learn to play a song, you bring a sheet: a printout of the lyrics and the chords, just make sure you bring enough copies for everyone.

These guys aren’t professionals, they just love playing together. Sometimes people hit clams or miss parts, and sometimes everyone kills it. We hit the harmonies, nail the drum break, slay the solo and the room gets that full and lifting feeling, that elevated heart-rise that happens when music is good and music is love.

They don’t play for anyone but themselves. Every Monday, starting at 5:15.

Feeling Alive

Chalk it up to multiple childhood readings of The Secret Garden, but I’ve always felt a kinship with plants. If you read this, you might have gathered that the dried up dead ole plant lurking in the brightest but apparently-not-bright-enough corner of my basement brownstone was making me feel dried up, ole, dead, and stuck in a dark corner. Just like when my college roommate killed my orchid by mistakenly watering it with vodka, the symbolism doesn’t go too deep there. After writing about the dying plant, I left the house to go to a meeting and returned to find Sweetheart had populated the window with two new, very green, very alive plants. The next day, it’s warm enough to have the windows open, the breeze is coming in bringing tidings of adventure, and it’s bright enough in here (at least for now) for the prisms I have hanging hopefully between the window bars like a hipster Polyanna to yield little rainbows. Sometimes all it takes is a little green and a little light.

Soweto Gospel Choir!

The amazing Soweto Gospel Choir is playing a FREE SHOW tonight in Fort Greene! It’s through Carnegie Hall’s “community sings” program, so the whole crowd just might get involved. If you’re in the hood, stop by for Reubens at our house before (fresh made corned beef and house-baked-rye bread)… now thatsa New York.

Details:
Emmanuel Baptist Church (that’s where this was happening on marathon day)
7:30
279 Lafayette Avenue (at Washington Avenue)
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Just a little Valentine

My grandfather carried a handkerchief, and I think it’s a special, sweet, old-fashioned, and useful little thing- harkening back to an age of simple and elegant manliness. You can give it to a crying woman on a bench somewhere, entertain a small child, mop your brow, smooth the neck of a guitar, pick up a handgun at a crime scene like it’s 1939, wrap up a sweet treat to go, put it up your sleeve or suit pocket, perform sleight of hand, or (obviously) blow your nose. This Valentine’s Day, I gave Sweetheart a parcel of plain white cotton handkerchiefs that I clumsily embroidered- three with hearts and three each with funny squashed A’s on them (his initial), because I think he’s all of these things- sweet, old fashioned, simple, and manly. This little project was easy and fun- I knocked out the embroidery drinking beer and watching Downton Abbey (reveling in both my emancipation and my needlepoint). If you’re a crewel mistress, you could make these pretty fancy, but you really only need a simple running stitch to keep it manly. Get 100% cotton hankies, wash them and iron them first, double the thread, and just freehand the hearts. And, hey, it’s not 1800, if they turn out a little crookedy, that’s ok.

Valentine’s Day: time for useful tools

Maybe it’s the time of year, or maybe it’s the time of mind, but- for whatever reason- it feels like this Valentine’s Day shouldn’t be one of extravagant luxuries. Now, Valentine’s Day is a freighted holiday to begin with ( it’s a hallmark holiday/it’s arbitrary/shouldn’t every day be Valentine’s day, bla bla bla), but I’ll just go ahead and put it out there: I like Valentine’s Day. I’m a romantic at heart, and I’ll take any excuse for small gestures: I like getting fresh flowers delivered, I like surprises, I like love notes, I like champagne. But this year, I’m feeling like I’m in a place where I’m putting more and more value on small, simple pleasures and focusing on things done rather than things bought…I’m pining after objects of use AND beauty. Like the scissors above. Or a sharp little knife. Or a reciprocating saw (just kidding. sort of.). Here are my favorite little objects of love, for any Valentine:#8 Opinel Knife, with Arrow Design, from Spartan (or without, from Gravel and Gold)Mixtape dispenser, from ModCloth.

Flashman Hudson Bay Axe, from Best Made.Map Tacks, or really, anything, from KioskANY design Custom Stamp from the amazing Casey Rubber Stamps in the East Village.Compass Necklace, from Redtruckdesigns.A picnic blanket to recreate this (image from here)

And that’s just off the top of my head. Happy Valentine’s Day, loves.

Brooklyn Friday Night: what to do?

Don’t feel like braving the hordes on the Lower East Side (ever. again.)? No good music in the hood? Bored to death with “Bored to Death”? I have three words for you, my friend: Minor League Hockey. Did you know that Brooklyn has its own hockey team? Did you know that Minor League Hockey is totally awesome? Did you know that there’s still a place in America where you can get a beer for $3? All of this: amazing and true. Pretty much every Friday night the Brooklyn Aviators take the ice out at Floyd Bennett Field- the oldest airfield in New York City, once a home base for flyboys like Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan and aviatrices like Miss Amelia Earhart– the rink is in a converted hangar. The hangar complex has been re-modeled into a fantastical bizarrely/wonderfully suburban feeling sports complex with a climbing wall, middle-school-date-ripe skating rink, basketball courts, gymnastics gear, and a funny, all-nations-food-court where the guy who runs the pizza ovens sort of looks like Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver. The place is great- a departure, an adventure- but the hockey… that’s something else entirely. Fast and furious and beautiful and funny and brutally action packed, it’s everything you thought you knew about hockey (the missing teeth, the fights, the French Canadians) writ large and about 8 feet away from you. I think I saw someone’s nose get broken. And it was awesome. Also, I now understand the origin of the phrase “the gloves come off” (see above- ice littered with gloves, nose of dude on right- yeah, the big dude- about to get broken). Also, if the game stops because of a fight, they play the “Rocky” theme song over the loudspeaker. Also, because it’s minor league, at intermission they do hilarious things like “hockey bowling”- slinging a small child across the ice in an inner-tube to knock down huge inflatable pins and stadium employees. Also, zamboni. And if all that weren’t enough, let me reiterate: Beers are $3.

Tonight, February 10th, the Brooklyn Aviators face off against the Danbury Whalers at 7:35 pm sharp. Buy tickets here.

To get to Floyd Bennett Field you can:

a) If you have a car: drive all the way down Flatbush avenue, and turn left just before the Marine Park Bridge. Or, take the Belt Parkway (under the Verrazano Bridge, swinging by Randazzo’s on the way) to exit 11S.
b) Take the 2 or 5 train to the Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College  station (last stop), Take the Q35 bus one block from the train station – Flatbush  Ave. between Nostrand Avenue and Avenue. Request the bus to stop across from Aviator Sports and  Recreation at Floyd Bennett Field.
c) Stop one of the dollar buses cruising down Fulton yelling “Utica! Utica!” out of the window. It will cost you $1.
d) charter a helicopter flight and land at Floyd Bennett’s helipad.

For my Valentine?

Since I can’t figure out how to buy this from the apparently amazing Anna Louise Mould, I’m thinking if I can replicate this amazing banjo-head painting for my Sweetheart in time for Valentine’s day. Since he’s the sweetest kind of karmically-transplanted-mountain-man-reborn-in-the-body-of-a-native-New-Yorker, this would be just his kind of “Pimp my Ride”. Swoon.

 

props to the stunning Woodsmaiden, for capturing my heart as always.

The Brooklyn Endoresment: Richard III

We went and saw Richard III last night at BAM and it was every bit as incredibly, brutally, bloodily, hilariously, terrifyingly relevantly awesome as we could have hoped. Lots of people have said this very same thing but: Kevin Spacey is frightfully wonderful and awefully magnetic, and, 10 things I hate about You not withstanding, like so many productions of Shakespeare, eerie parallels between now and then are as unsettling as watching the Republican primaries. The best part? The show runs through March 4, 2012. Run, don’t walk (with a limp).

Buy tickets here.

Happy Weekend, Happy Chinese New Year!

This week marks Chinese Lunar New Year, officially kicking off the year of the dragon! This year there are two parades in Manhattan’s Chinatown, one happened this past Monday, January 23rd DRAGONYEAR, and the second is coming up this Sunday the 29th. On Monday we started the celebration by getting down to Mott street early enough to stake our claim to a prime dim sum and dragon-dance-watching spot, eating pork buns, chicken feet, and delightful garlicky greens while the clatter of drums and the din of cymbals made sure that any evil omens and bad spirits lurking around got the hell out of there. The dragons dance up and down the streets, coming into open businesses to collect money to ensure luck and well-being. This one was wearing a shower cap because it was drizzling and, I guess, like me, dragons are sensitive to humidity ruining their hair. I think he looks pretty great.This paper represents what we ordered over three hours for lunch. Somewhere in those hieroglyphics are the aforementioned pork buns and chicken feet, shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, vegetable dumplings, scallion dumplings, doughnut noodles (!), spicy squid, Chinese broccoli, garlicky bok choi, bean curd wraps, chili oil, Chinese winter sausage, fried shrimp with bacon, fish balls, sweet custards, sticky rice in lotus leaves, multiple coke classics, and eleven pots of tea- all ordered in Aunt Sheila’s perfectly wonderful Upper-East-by-way-of-Bensonhurst accented cantonese. She’ll tell you “I don’t speak cantonese, I only speak Dim Sum”. Repeat after me: Josh-eeuw-Baow (BBQ pork bun). That’s all you need to know.
And, of course, it was only $15 per person for the feast.Join in the festivities for yourselves this coming Sunday, January 29th, here’s the info:

13th Annual Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade & Festival
11:30 a.m. – 4 pm, Sunday, January 29, 2012
Place: Canal Street South

The parade usually winds throughout Chinatown along Mott, Canal, and Bayard streets, and along East Broadway. Gung hay fat choy!