Happy Worst Day Ever!

Swap. With beer. And charity.

Sunday 1/23 Swap Meet @ Southpaw
bring something..take something…

3-8pm
$5 cover includes a drink and free food, good music & cheap drink specials all day

Trade or donate your unwanted items in good, clean condition…
Clothing, housewares, books, records & electronics.
nothing to trade? purchase items for a small donation to NY Cares and Housingworks.
All donations and items remaining from the swap to benefit NY Cares and Housingworks.
…get the junk out of your trunk and come on over!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

And Lori and I have plenty to be thankful for.

Nice op-ed piece about Thanksgiving and eel (and eel and wasteful greed).  I don't think we've ever had eel on thanksgiving, but seeing this and having mentioned my grandparents here a couple of days ago I will just say that I have some pretty dramatic memories of eel thrashing around their kitchen.

Reahabilitation Through the Arts

The Unofficial House Band of Sing Sing from Fly's Eye Films on Vimeo.

Lota and I attended a benefit last evening for Rehabilitation Through the Arts - mostly theater, but also some music, dance and poetry readings - and you would have had to have been a stone not to have been moved.  A few of the scenes and monologues written by prisoner members of RTA were just devastating. And lest you think this is a soft heart-on-the-sleeve sort of thing, New York State Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, Brian Fischer, attended and was honored for his support of RTA. 

Dear Diary, Dante and I share a smoke and everything is a little clearer now

Dear Diary, sorry to have been away so long.  I've been spending time with my friend, Lamy Vista, I think I mentioned her before.  You know how it is.  And helping out a bit somewhere else.  Sort of important.

Anyway, I shared a little smoke with Dante this morning and he remindid me I really ought to say something. So here I am:

Last weekend, at our place, after we'd returned home from our sojourns, James Guido, el zorro plateado, or, I guess, really la volpe argentata, cooked a beatiful tuna over carmelized onions and a balsamic vinegar reduction, and broccoli rabe and a dish his mother used to make that's like a pizza rustica without the pastry. Lori made a salad with green olives and sassy almonds and she made a monster goat-cheese cake with a crushed brittle topping, and I made mushroom & fontina pizza for everyone to start with. R&E brought fabu wines & chocolates & a special guest, P&K brought bubbles galore. It was a great night, but here's why I'm really mentioning it: there were fishetarians in the house, so I couldn't put any slices of my cured duck breast on the pizza. Bubububutttt, I'd made enough dough and prepared enough mushroom to make another pizza the next day & did & lavished it with deep dark duck which got deeper and darker after 7 minutes of hot hot hot. And the next day after that I made a side of Brussels sprouts & figs with cubed up little pancetta-like ducky.

There. Sometimes it's all about the duck. Because sometimes all the other stories go somewhere else.

Oh - one other thing. The Losers' Lounge 60th Birthday tribute to Karen Carpenter at Joes Pub was (and will be again tonight) absolutely killer. Killer.  Absolutely On Top Of The World.

Tuli Kupferberg benefit at St. Ann's Warehouse this Friday evening

Help the man who helped bring you so much joyful insanity (as opposed to the other kind).  From the article at Broadwayworld:

Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Lou Reed will join a host of others in the January 22nd concert to benefit Tuli Kupferberg. Kupferberg is an American singer songwriter and found of the band The Fugs who suffered a series of strokes in April and September 2009, leaving him blind and in need of full time nursing care. The concert will take place at St. Ann's Warehouse, Friday, January 22 at 7:30 P.M.

The full lineup will include The Fugs, John Kruth and an All Star Band, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Pete Stampfel, John Zorn. More performers have yet to be announced.

Fugs homepage.  A 1965 photo of the Fugs (meet the Fugs) by David Gahr: wow.

It seems a good place to put the first dollar of the new decade.

RS has sent a New Year's note, and I don't think he'll mind if I post it here.  Old people might remember RS as the Ralph Nader look-alike back in Stumpy's blogs of '01.

I've seen him around the neighborhood for years with his street weary boxes of candies and his wind burnished face, enduring.  On occasion I have put coins in his can, more often I give him a passing glance and brush on. This morning out walking into the fatigue and guarded elation of a new year I pass him sitting in front of starbucks in his big rolling chair, quiet with his candy, seemingly as dazed and determined as me about this new day. Ten yards past, I stop, turn back and approach him.

He looks down, roots around his crumpled box and extracts a tattered bag of candy and hands it to me in exchange. I stand still, he tilts his head up and croaks ... happy ... new .... year. 

Then he extends his fist slowly over his chair's arm seeking my fist. 

It seems a good place to put the first dollar of the new decade.

William Jefferson to the rescue!

via the New Yorker online,
ol'dawg Willy C. saves the day.

and ain't that a truly fearsome duo pictured in the post below,
Dante and Ju Ju be striking the fear of Dawg into one and all.
AND just where in the hell is that lazy-ass chango tonto muckerfrikker?

Sharecropper

Sharecropper. Via Brooklyn Based. Plant something.

forty year anniversary of Easy Rider...

wow...

caught sight of that news at some blog or another, you can look up your own item regarding this news via this googled link.
Just an aside here, recently viewed a film titled Elegy w/Ben Kingsley and Dennis Hopper, a long way from his role as Billy in Easy Rider.

manohman, was just an impressionable young buck of sixteen when I saw easy rider, the northgate theatre in ol' EPT...

Later that same day...
two wonderful pieces from two different sources, both worthy of thy studied perusal:
The Things That Carried Him by Chris Jones, courtesy Esquire Magazine online;
How David Beats Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell, via the online New Yorker.

Be there, or be square. NY Writers Coalition party @ Galapagos. Tomorrow, Feb. 9, at 7 PM.

a hero to all of us who have long wished...

for the opportunity to fling something at that enormous waste of space known as G.W. Bush.
courtesy the NYT: Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero

Greenhorns and rye

Macinwi told me he and the family helped plant rye at Shelter Island Farm this Thanksgiving holiday (yo, get blogging, farmer), and that the community doings were filmed by the Greenhorns project people. Don't know the Greenhorn, but hey, they are taking farmer nominations for inclusion in the project. Tell your maw, tell your paw, tell your twin sister who moved down east.

John Francis walks the Earth

@ Ted, where it says:

For almost three decades, John Francis has been a planetwalker, traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility (for 17 of those years without speaking). A funny, thoughtful talk with occasional banjo.

I've always wanted to take a long, long walk. Stay with the talk to the end. There's a nice pay-off.

Yes we did

Thanks Macinwi. Thanks Wyno. Oh, yes, we've already ordered ours.

What to do now?

Well, it's a question I'm hearing. It's a question I'm asking. Maybe it's time to look seriously at getting involved with the local community board (CB6)? I can do that. I think.

greetings from the left coast...

and, likely, from the lefty-est part of that left coast, btw...

passed along to me from dear pals JaneyKakes & Phillipe:

Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:23:38 PM
Subject: Obama spots by Bob and Noni

Noni and I wrote and directed two independent pro-Obama spots, which you can view using the links below. Turn your sound up, and if the links don't work try copying them into your browser one at a time. The spots are called Prayer and Game, and they're 30 seconds each.
This grew out of a grassroots effort of a bunch of women sitting down in someone's living room, who gave themselves the informal name of Mamas for Obama. No need to call us, just spread the word by forwarding these links. This is a viral campaign.

Bob & Noni

Mamas for Obama video numero uno, Prayer

Mamas for Obama video numero dos, Game

Oh, and there's a group raising money to air some of these spots (including one or both of ours) in local cable markets in swing states. You can give any amount by going to this web site:
mamas for obama

Si se puede

What better thing to do right now while we're down in the mud than remember why so many folks supported Barack Obama from so early on? (Yes, you've seen it. It made the rounds 8 months ago. See it again. Show it to Mom, Dad, Uncle Pete and Little Junior. Surf's up.)

good for monkeys!

some of mine own distant cousins hard at work in Japan

but they're taking away jobs from humans!

and jessferdahalibut-
here's Christopher Walken reciting Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.

una cosa mas, for today.
one of the best at this weblogging business, and has been worthy of lengthy repeated perusals for all of the eight years he's been at it. Happy Anniversary to Mark W. &
his wood s lot

Newbie voter registrars

By the time we got down to Philly yesterday morning the city was already crawling with volunteers. We got our training at the Center City Obama campaign office, which was buzzing with all sorts of people of every age. We got our training, pep talk, one clipboard, one pen, 4 PA forms, absentee ballots, a Jersey form or two, a little literature.

On the street it took a while to hit our stride and find the voice and body language that got most people's attention without annoying the crap out of them. We did register a few folks, gave out an absentee ballot and a Jersey ballot. That's what we were told to expect - if we got a couple of registrations, that would be great - a bunch of people coming back with a few each, all together making a significant number.

Reactions from people on the street were great. Not always good, but great in the human range of hostile to curmudgeon to surprised to friendly to thankful to Hell Yes to I AM SO EXCITED! And then there were a couple of genuinely certifiable folks, very deep paranoids. Not being in the military or retail, I'm thinking I called more people Sir and Mam yesterday than in any other day of my life. A lot of Thank Yous in both directions. Lots of folks doing the head dodge until they actually hear what you're saying, then they make contact and, Yes, I am, thanks. And a lot of folks who clearly were excited by Obama, and felt completely connected to this election.

Any way, we had fun. It was a beautiful late summer, early autumn day, dry and bright blue, in a mostly blue city. Maybe we've gotten enough of a baptism now to go knock on doors and canvas for Obama.

And, you, Excuse me Sir, Mam, are you registered to vote?
Only a couple of weeks left to do it.