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December 2, 2011

This Video Will Totally Go Viral by Jennifer Mendelsohn

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: american idol, babies, commercial, kids, men, racist, stop-motion, video — Comments Off

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November 18, 2011

Gyros to Heroes: A Column About Sandwiches: Immortal-licious by Lindsay Eanet

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: beer, celebrity, heart, kids, men, video, women — Comments Off

“I want a sandwich named after me.” — Jon Stewart

- – -

It’s in ingrained in our nature, this desire to want to be remembered, to leave a legacy that will echo through the ears of your great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond. There’s something delightful in the prospect of having a sandwich named after you—it’s no Purple Heart or Great American Novel or registered charity, but some people just want to be thought of while strangers are ordering lunch.

That being said, there are a number of strategies one could take when seeking to get a sandwich named after them. Let’s walk through five of them, and where you could go about it.

Strategy I: Create One
Productos Extremeños — Getafe, Spain
The ‘Bocata Karen’: Wheat bread, chicken, brie, lettuce, honey and apples.

Variety is never a bad thing, but to the sandwich enthusiast, it can be terrifying. Upon entering the innocuous café near the university campus, you are met with thousands upon thousands of pieces of brightly colored paper, each with the name and recipe of a salad or sandwich a customer created. There is already a twinge of sadness building. Even if you do make the greatest sandwich ever and have it named after you, will people be able to see it amongst the others? Will anybody know? You’ll know, the voice replies, and that’s all that matters.

Notice the smile creep across your face when the women behind the counter calls you “honey pie,” hints at an Extremaduran accent through the English. Take a bite and immediately experience remorse. Not because the sandwich you’ve created tastes bad—in fact, the opposite—but because this feels like the draft before the masterpiece. You know you can improve upon the design.

You return to the sandwich shop three times a week for the next month, taking notes from each colorful scrap of paper on the wall, slowly watching your travel savings and your waistline develop a strange inverse relationship. Each time, you draw ever closer, each marriage of bocadillo baguette to filling a step towards sandwich Areté. Once you have reached it, and if it is an original design, the women behind the counter will write it down on one of their colorful sheets of paper and tack it on the wall, signed with a declaration of Muy rico! and a smiley face.

Strategy II: Earn It
R U Hungry? — New Brunswick, New Jersey
The Fat Maleman: Cheesesteak, mozzarella sticks, marinara, bacon, hot peppers, French fries, named for Voorhees, New Jersey mail carrier Dave Goldstein.

It’s February—Rutgers is in the throes of basketball season and New Brunswick is in the throes of a slushy, dismal mess that makes walking to class and home from the bars feel like cheating death. The cold makes your stomach long for a blanket, something thick and comforting. The growl lurks and ripples at the base of your gullet under all those layers of winter wear.

You begin to have reservations as you approach the truck. Five fat sandwiches, half an hour and the custom sandwich is yours. You watched that one show on the Travel Channel where the guy who does all the eating competitions failed. His strategy was all wrong, you think. On the ride up to New Brunswick, you and your accomplices discussed where he failed. The vegetarian burger would have been too starchy, you offer. The textures of meat and meat substitute did not meld harmoniously in his digestive tract. You will watch your companion confidently attempt the competition fail. Coming up on 26 minutes and several bites into the last Fat Darrell, your companion will stumble to a nearby trashcan and expel everything into it like a frantic mother bird. In a sick and sadistic way, it will make you want to conquer it more.

Goldstein, he who carries letters in his hands and sandwiches in his belly, finished three Fat Kokos (Cheesesteak, mozzarella sticks, fries and marinara) and two Fat Cats (double cheeseburger, fries, lettuce, tomato, mayo and ketchup) in a record-setting 27 minutes and 50 seconds to earn his spot on R U Hungry’s custom menu. You could do it in 27:49 if you tried. It will be over in a flash and all you will remember of the ordeal is searing pain and the salty, chewy, runny goodness of mozzarella sticks in the first bite and glory will be yours.

Strategy III: Be A Celebrity
Flashback Diner — Boca Raton, Florida
The Elton John: Charbroiled chicken breast topped with cheddar cheese and bacon.

This somehow seems the most effective strategy, but also one of the riskiest, as depending on how your career goes, the ingredients of your sandwich will be a bit of a crapshoot. There are really only two steps to this strategy: the first is to become a celebrity (any kind will do, but film star tends to work best) and the second is to try and be likable. I wonder if celebrities, when they go about their daily business, ever think about what would go into a sandwich named after them.

If you are disappointed with the sandwich, a la Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, you can always try asking Ted Danson to switch with you. It probably won’t work. But at least you can pick the capers off.

Strategy IV: Ask Nicely (on National Television)
Jaws Jumbo Burgers — Farmington Hills, Michigan
The “I Want A Sandwich Named After Me” Dave Letterman Burger: ground sirloin, bacon, American and Swiss cheese, Thousand Island dressing, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, mustard, pickles and grilled onions.

Find a way to get on national television. The easiest way to do this now it seems is to either be a celebrity (see Strategy III) or become Internet-famous. Create a viral video of yourself doing something ridiculous and attention-seeking. Tweet it to all your friends. Watch it spread until one day you get the call from a local talk show. Go on said show. Do the bit the audience wants to see, and then ask for the good sandwich artists of America to erect a bread-and-meat monument in your honor. Today, you are a Pharaoh.

Strategy V: Befriend A Chef
The Blackstone Hotel — Omaha, Nebraska
The Reuben: Rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut, named for Reuben Kulakofsky
(Disclaimer: This is one of several origin stories of the Reuben and should not be taken as sandwich gospel.)

There is already a beer waiting for you when you sit down. These are friends you’ve met with at the same bar for what has felt like eons but has probably only been about two years. You met the first one at some work thing or some terrible cocktail party or Bikram yoga because you just weren’t sure what to do with yourself when you first moved to this city.

Neither of you knew anyone else there and thus stuck together, discovered you disliked all the same people but thought that new Decemberists album was pretty great so the next week you were invited to this weekly meeting at this lovely dive, the kind of place where the knowledge it exists makes you feel like a friend has just told you they’re in a secret relationship with a rock star—this space is ours, and it is lovely.

You’re usually the only group in on a Monday at that hour, so the folks in the kitchen begin testing new snacks and things on your group. You get to know the people preparing your meals—their backstories, kids’ names, blood types. They get to know you and why you moved there in the first place. The exchanges turn into a strange friendship, and as your ‘regular’ status is cemented, a sandwich is custom-made in your honor. It’s written on the menu board in colorful chalk, and suddenly you feel like you could live here forever.

November 14, 2011

Sarah Walker Shows You How: How to Ride a Train by Sarah Walker

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: beer, dentist, dog, fun, funny, men, mom, phone, trains, video — Comments Off

First, decide that you need to go to the dentist because the guilt of them reminding you of your six-month checkup, two years after your last six-month checkup, is just too much. They keep calling and sending little postcards, no one you know keeps in that good touch with you. Note that the term “general dentistry” is both funny and frightening. Make sure that your dentist is a two-hour train ride away in your hometown, because it’s a good excuse to see your mom, and also to have her pay for it because only billionaires and some select millionaires have dental insurance these days.

Then, time your walk to Penn Station so you get there exactly when the train is boarding, because every extraneous second spent in Penn Station is the worst second, despite the fact that the woman who announces trains has an incredibly soothing voice. She sounds like a really great fourth grade teacher or a cool aunt. Penn Station also plays classical music, offers beer in plastic to-go cups with straws, and show videos of police dogs in action. You know what? Penn Station isn’t that bad. If your train were delayed, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

When your train is an hour and a half delayed, and you are over the classical music (way to have NO WORDS, classical music!), and there are only so many times you can laugh when you hear Soothing Voiced Lady say, “trains to Ronkonkoma,” and who cares about a video of dogs, you want to see REAL DOGS, you may once again come to the conclusion that Penn Station is The Worst.

When your track is finally announced try to act nonchalant as dozens of people swarm to the gate. Resist the urge to yell, “We’re all going to get on the train so everyone JUST CHILL OUT, OK???” Also note that now is not the time to teach the course you’ve been developing, “Personal Space and the Value of it to You and Everyone Around You 101.”

Board the train and find an empty row. Sit next to the window and place your bag so it sort of spills over onto the seat next to you, not so you’re blatantly keeping a seat, but just enough so it doesn’t look inviting. Pull out a copy of Arrive: The Magazine for Northwest Business Travelers, from the pouch in front of you. Read an article in Arrive: The Magazine for Northwest Business Travelers about a cheese shop in Brooklyn. Put the magazine in your bag, because there’s a photo in there of a handsome cheesemonger that you want to show your friend. Jot down an idea to start a magazine called Train Mall, which will be like Sky Mall, but for trains. Look around you to make sure that no idea thieves have seen you do this.

Make phone calls that you secretly hope are broken up because service is spotty on the train. Shout into your phone, “Sorry! I’ll call you back, service is spotty on the train!” Then note that there are several prominently placed signs that read QUIET CAR, and you’re getting mean looks from people. Sheepishly put away your phone.

Walk to the dining car and purchase one (1) can of Coca Cola, one (1) mini bottle of white wine, and one (1) packet of peanut M&M’s. Consume the white wine. Return for another mini bottle because you realize that it would be irresponsible, nay, disrespectful to your dentist to eat M&M’s before your appointment. Recall that once a traveling scientist/dentist came to your elementary school and performed a demonstration of how soda damages your teeth by dipping a giant model of a tooth attached to a string into a vat of Coke, and when he pulled it out it was all brown and eroded and steaming. Conclude that although that might have been a traveling scientist/dentist propaganda scare tactic, it’s probably safest to stick with wine.

Listen to music for a while and keep turning up the volume because why is it so soft? Your headphones might be broken. Then notice more mean looks from people around you and realize that your headphones are not plugged in and you’re just blasting music from your phone in the Quiet Car. At least you introduced them to a cool song. Nevertheless, again, sheepishly put away your phone.

Feel the need to explain to your fellow passengers that your recent behavior is not representative of who you are. Stand up and say in a strong voice coupled with confident hand gestures, “I am one of you! I am a very considerate person who would never disturb the Quiet of this Car! Please believe me!” Then start a slow clap. When no one joins in shout, “I’m not on this train to make friends! I have enough friends!” You might be drunk.

As the conductor approaches, show yourself out of the Quiet Car. Spend the remainder of your trip in the Dining Car, where people understand you.

November 8, 2011

No Fear of Flying: Kamikaze Missions in Death, Sex, and Comedy: Its All Gonna Break by Michelle Mirsky

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: hell, humor, iphone, joke, Jokes, men, mom, money, office, phone, video, women — Comments Off

My month with the Blond Poet was, on the surface and in all other ways, a terrible idea. Two hopelessly broken writers in the midst of ending marriages start frantically screwing between poetry readings and art shows. “You’re in trouble,” said the injured poet, his bruises still visible. “I’m trouble for you. I don’t want to, but I’ll hurt you…”

And I, the grieving mother, replied: “Well, don’t hurt me, then. You don’t have to, you know.” No way was this ever going to end well.

The night I meet the poet, it has been one week to the day since Lev died. With the mourners mostly gone, I’ve begun to feel convalescent, frayed. I’m still on leave from work, alternately sleeping all day and climbing the walls. I accept all invitations. I arrive late to this reception on the roof of an art space downtown (The elevator up plays a video loop of “The 900 number” by The 45 Kings, interpreted into sign language). I am so hungry, but have missed the food. My friends feed me wine instead. A girlfriend has arranged to introduce me to this poet, having shown me a photo of him on her iPhone a month earlier. In the photo, he stood in a dressing room, a bearded blond in a light blue suit. The pants of which were, it could be argued, much too tight. When we meet in November, the poet is wearing a winter vest and dirty grey jeans. A season has passed. He is handsome despite the stitches in his lip and scrapes on his arms, the result of a bike wreck in which a car hit him and he went flying; his second serious accident in a year. He has no sense of humor about this. The night on the roof, his eyes keep finding the part of my leg between tall boot and short skirt.

The poet doesn’t laugh at my jokes on the roof, but he’s listening. When he smiles, his expression reads as suspension of disbelief. Some drunk twenty-something girl the poet knows spills a full glass of red wine into my purse. Everything is soaked. She doesn’t apologize, keeps talking about semiotics and fashion. Her boyfriend rolls his eyes. I excuse myself to the restroom and throw away most of the contents of my purse. I try to shake the wet warmth out of my head, but it’s mingled with the cold and I become fog. My legs are goosebumped from sitting on the roof for too long, and from meeting you. You’re blond; have a beard; are a poet. You’re tall and indignant. You have watched me this whole night. You have kept up. You are mine; like a mink cape I want badly enough to steal from the coat check. I think all this, I try to sop it up but the wine has soaked into everything.

It gets cold and late and couple of us move across the street to a restaurant with cowhide pillows and a fireplace and drink more red wine. In the lounge of the restaurant, I show the poet three of my tattoos. Later, he tells me this moment is when he knows he’ll see me naked. Afterward, while we wait for the valet to bring our cars around, I touch his stomach with the palm of my hand and I ask if he’s kissed anyone yet with his busted lip. He says he hasn’t, but he’d be game to try. I’ll bet you would, I say. And I drive off. Or at least that’s how it happens in my head.

The next time we meet, everyone plays Threes at a dance party in a printmaker’s studio. People have their own dice. One girl has fingerless gloves. It’s legit. Everyone looks French or bohemian or East Coast preppy. I win some money, lose it again, and make an excuse to drive the poet and his bike home (he doesn’t have or want a car, content to keep bouncing off cars indefinitely, it would appear). We spar about music all the way to his place. He says my favorite New Pornographers song is not the best. The best, he says, is on Twin Cinemas. He can’t remember what it’s called. We should go inside and he’ll play it for me. To which I reply: “What are we, 15?” But I go with him. “Sing Me Spanish Techno.” Yeah, that’s a good one. We make out on the couch in his freezing house with no heat till our lips hurt and I’m fairly certain I eat his stitches at some point.

There’s an abundance of research out there around grief and loss—some dry and some colorful—that points to sex as solace. This holds up mostly for men, who (per the research) typically intellectualize their pain and look for physical release in the wake of sorrow. Women are deemed “feelers.” I don’t exactly know what this means. What I do know is this: sex with the poet was like meth and opium stirred into a bottomless glass of warm milk; intense comfort after which I could not sleep. Too much was never enough. Morning: he would kiss me awake and we’d tear each other limb from limb, he’d make me coffee with honey and trace his fingers on my shoulders while I drank it. In between sips, I’d rest the mug on his divorce papers. Noon: we’d hide under heaps of blankets, warm and rushed. Night: he’d bring glasses of water and wine to bed for us, help me off with my boots and we’re back under the covers, not sleeping.

We carried on a nonstop, rambling intellectual conversation that never became an argument, never a debate. Me: “Semantics is my God.” Him: “Semantics never saved anyone. Except Bill Clinton.” The rapport was fast and strong and natural—which, in turn, made us both uneasy. It was not a good idea for two people as broken as we were to get too relaxed. The worst was yet to come for each of us and we both knew it. In the meantime, we were busy drinking Malbec and eating fancy cheese and warm olives. He tells me one night as he opens the car door for me that he’s trying to impress me. I tell him I’m impressed. We are like younger versions of ourselves. New. He touches me constantly. He cannot watch me across a table, on adjacent stools, sitting quietly, without grabbing some part of me and us falling. Words fail me. I say things anyway. I think: I want to memorize him and text him to my friends. I think: I love him. One night while he was dressing to leave, I buttoned his shirt for him like we were a couple of settled old folks. He smiled. Kissed my face. I scratched his beard.

The company of the poet and his cadre of art-makers made me anxious that I wasn’t writing, that I had strayed so far from what I’d always done. So I wrote. At first I edited old stories. Then I started re-working abandoned ideas in a new voice. The poet was encouraging. He never asked and I never offered to let him read anything of mine. He woke early each morning and wrote before biking to his office. I preferred to write at night. If we’d not spent the night together, he would text or call me first thing to check-in and I’d rouse myself, join the world. A routine. Like clockwork. I wrote, now. Again.

- – -

There is this kind of construction crane—the sort you have to get a whole crew of skilled workers to assemble before you can build the thing you needed the crane to lift into being. These cranes are stories tall and when they begin to take shape, they appear sturdy, permanent. And as you watch one getting built, you think you’re watching an end unto itself, but it’s the making of the means. The moment when the crane-not-structure realization hits you is confusion, longing, recalibration of expectations and a little bit of awe. I recount this analogy at lunch one day with the poet. We pull apart our grilled salami sandwiches and wipe grease from our fingers as we talk. Building these things—this marriage, this home, this family—and then dismantling them: my life thus far has been spent building a crane I needed to build the life I was building all along. He says all women want everything to turn into something, to evolve. But I don’t think he’s right. He tells me that he’s moving to the East Coast (he doesn’t). I feel like maybe I shouldn’t see him again (I do).

After he watches the ghost of a drunk John Berryman being interviewed on the BBC, the poet lets his beard grow like rambling weeds for weeks. He tells me about Berryman over breakfast one Saturday morning. My broken cell phone calls my ex-husband and leaves this conversation on his voicemail. The poet’s not-blue eyes are deep and wet. He tries to tell me he’s breaking down. I try to hear him, but I can’t help. I’m not here to help. He writes lines of poetry about my hair, my skin, my tattoos and texts them to me. I watch him read 40 of his poems (none of them are about me) on a stage at a bar. That night, I predict it. The end:

Me: You’ll read me like a book, till you’re sure know the story. Then you’ll put me back on the shelf and not open me again.

Him: No, not like that.

Me: You’ll see. I’m the poem that wrote you.

Him: Go to sleep, little girl. [ snore ]

The End, after so much banging, is all whimper. The poet breaks up with me via text message because he doesn’t want to help me move my car. He immediately starts sleeping with a 23 year-old blond cheerleader from the Midwest. There is talk—among our mutual friends—that he has had a minor breakdown, an after effect of his bike wreck(s) et al, and he simply couldn’t handle the intensity. Maybe he just needed to fuck more and new people to solve his ontological despair. It doesn’t matter. We never spoke again. Not one time ever. That was it. Fin.

In the winter, months after we are done, I buy his new book—a book he was putting the finishing touches on when we met. I pre-ordered it the first week it was available and hoped that in the months I’d have to wait for it to arrive from his small press, I’d finish pining, sober up. When the time came, it took me by surprise. I had been home a week with the flu. Chills and shakes and hallucinations. The first day I could get out of bed, I went to the mailbox and the book was there in a hand-labeled envelope. I read it cover to cover. Cried. Sobbed, really.

At its core, the book is about deciding to leave comfort behind, and then upon burning bridges, changing everything, starting a new life—realizing the new life is just as deadened and even more brutal, but you can’t go home, because you belong nowhere when all is said and done. It’s about divorce. It’s about being an artist. It’s about being in your thirties. It’s about all of these things or none of these things. And it is brilliant. It made me feel better, somehow, that of all of the things I had gotten wrong, he most certainly was not a shitty poet.

Months later I will run into him on the street. I am on a date with a tall, handsome inconsequential fellow who is holding my hand at the time. I see the poet but it doesn’t register until he’s passed me that I had actually just SEEN THE POET. I hear the friend who’s walking with him call out my name, I turn around to look and I yell back, wave. We don’t stop. We keep on, walking in opposite directions. The poet sees me too now. He looks haunted. I’m the ghost. Or, at least, that’s how it happens in my head.

October 28, 2011

The Chorus Boy Chronicles: Any Way You Want It by Brian Spitulnik

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: blonde, computer, heart, men, mom, receipts, video — Comments Off

Of course it could have been some other job during those first months in New York. It could have been spraying perfume at Bloomingdales or dancing in a Bugs Bunny costume at a Queens Target opening. But Bloomingdales came later, and by the time the Target gig was offered, I knew enough to say no. As it happened, my first job out of college was as a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at a dinner theater forty-five minutes outside the city. It doesn’t sound so bad now; I wasn’t turning tricks or swinging from a pole, though many of my Michigan classmates may have whispered that whoring and working in dinner theater were essentially the same thing. But I had my own ideas about the person I was going to be in New York, and none of them included being the kind of dancer who had to take a job at a dinner theater in Westchester. Still, I told anyone who would listen that the gig was only four months of my life, and the paycheck would cover the rent for my shared East Village apartment. But as it turned out, I had to find myself a second job so I could eat and pay rent at the same time, and the dinner theater job ended after two months, not four.

A friend put me in touch with a writer we’ll call Greg Greene who was looking for a personal assistant. I lost no time in writing Greg an email proclaiming myself perfectly suited for the job. Sure, I was organized, selfless, and patient—or at least I could learn to be for the twenty bucks an hour he was offering to pay under the table.

I went to meet Greg at his ritzy midtown high-rise and, still sweating from the early September heat, knocked at the apartment to which I’d been directed by the downstairs doorman.

The door opened, and there stood Greg. His long, narrow torso was bare, his lower half covered only by a pair of mesh gym shorts. He shook his floppy, sandy-blond hair, and revealed a pair of mocking, heavy-lidded green eyes. I immediately began imagining my easy transition from personal assistant to live-in boyfriend. I saw myself moving into that ritzy high-rise; I pictured our beach house in Bridgehampton; I could see his conversion to Judaism (no Jew had hair that flopped with such un-neurotic ease).

“Hey,” he said, absently rubbing his torso, presumably just for the pleasure of feeling the ridges and valleys of his abs. “Come on in.”

I walked in and started decorating the airy apartment in my mind.

“So, what do I owe you?” Greg asked over the Journey song bleating from his open laptop.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, in the email, you said twenty an hour, but you know, whatever works for you…”

Greg had been rubbing his torso in that same distracted way, but stopped to look at me, confused. I stuttered that we had emailed about the personal assistant job as he said, “You’re here with the coke, right?”

I said I wasn’t, and he said, “Oh.” I asked if he was Greg Greene, he said he was Greg, but with a different last name, and I said, “Oh.” He then sat down on his couch, ran his hands through that goyisha hair, smiled and said, “Well, you wanna hang for a while anyway?”

Had the circumstances been different and had I been different, I might have decided that hanging with a gorgeous, half-naked cokehead in a $4,000 a month apartment was something to stick around for, at least for an hour or two. But I wasn’t different. I couldn’t imagine staying to fool around unless I was in love. So I started telling myself that I could be in love; I could try coke, I could listen to Journey, I could stop wearing product in my hair, I could sit around shirtless without incessantly thinking love handles love handles love handles. And if things went well, I could soon move in to that midtown skyscraper and become someone really interesting; someone I’d really like to know.

But I must have hesitated a moment too long because Greg was up off the couch, ushering me out the door, saying he was sorry for the mix-up. I headed for the elevator, wondering if I had just missed my one chance at true happiness.

I found the real Greg Greene downstairs, standing by the revolving glass door in the high-ceilinged lobby. He turned around at the sound of my sneakers on the marble floor. He had kind, hooded eyes, a wild bramble of curly hair, and looked like he could use a hug.

“Brian?” he said, extending his hand and smiling.

Over Pad Thai and Massaman curry down the block, Greg asked where I was from and what I had come to New York to do, then told me his boyfriend of several years had recently moved out.

“I need an assistant who’s gonna, you know, fill the holes my ex kind of left open in my life. You know?”

Though that sounded vaguely exhausting, I decided I could be the kind of person who was good at making someone forget someone else. I confessed that I’d recently broken up with my college boyfriend of three years, and that I, too, was having to reconfigure my life to see what my days meant without someone else’s needs to put before my own. That was when I realized Greg would be paying me to put his needs before mine, at least for a few hours a day. But I looked across the table at Greg, at his sad, smiling eyes, and decided that, if he hired me, I could make this work.

He did hire me, and from then on, I would arrive at Greg’s apartment around noon with a large coffee and an egg sandwich for him and a grilled chicken salad from Pax for me. I’d gently shake him awake each afternoon and he’d blurrily look up at me with the kind of smile I had previously associated with the term post-coital. Judging by that smile, I felt I was doing my job well, already succeeding at making him forget that ex-boyfriend. I’d then file his receipts, write checks for his ConEd and Time Warner bills, and deposit his weekly royalty payments while we chatted about his breakup or mine, about his big Jewish family or mine, about his potential writing projects, and about the ways success hadn’t really changed him. He’d encourage me to audition as much as I could, and he’d say that if I wanted to dance on Broadway, I should find a way to dance on Broadway. Then, around five or five-thirty, we’d hug, and I’d think back over the day, assessing whether or not I’d come across as adorable, intelligent, and winning. I was doing my best to present qualities I hoped, in certain lights, might amount to a loveable personality and lead to something significant, like a relationship or a raise.

For a while, I really liked working for Greg. There was something satisfying about thinking I could fix this man’s life; me, with my young person’s optimism; me, with my indeterminate dreams of stardom; me, with my conviction that there were indeed relationships that would never end. But I soon discovered I was a terrible personal assistant. I begrudged doing things like picking up Greg’s dry cleaning and shopping for his toothpaste; things I thought a grown man should be doing himself, despite the fact that he was paying me to do them.

“Oh, uh, hey, buddy,” Greg would say through a sheepish, apologetic grin. “The ConEd bill is fifty-six this month, but you wrote the check for one-hundred and twelve.” I’d turn pink and start sweating, apologizing as if I’d just kicked him in the balls. He’d assure me it was no big deal. I’d void the check, write a new one, then fume and pout for the rest of the day, silently furious at Greg for criticizing me; me, who wasn’t in love with him, but wanted to be, and thought that should be more than enough.

One day I shredded a tax document when I’d meant to photocopy it. The next day I failed to tell Greg his agent had called about a lucrative commission. As it became apparent that I was neither selfless nor organized nor patient, I began wearing form fitting T-shirts and tank tops to work everyday. I adopted the mindset of the fifty-something Bulgarian stripper I’d once gotten a lap dance from at friend’s bachelor party. That stripper had done her best to keep her bare limbs and wrinkled breasts in constant motion, flashing them like the talismans used for hypnotic induction. No one at the strip club had been hypnotized or even remotely distracted from the stripper’s age or her depressing scent of Jolly Ranchers and halitosis. I had become that stripper, prancing around Greg’s apartment, showing skin in hopes that he’d fall in love with me—or at least want to sleep with me—so it wouldn’t matter that I was working in dinner theater and couldn’t operate a fax machine.

After leaving Greg’s apartment each evening, I’d walk to 57th Street and board a van that would take me out of the city to perform for busloads of senior citizens in Westchester. By the first performance of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I was fairly certain that the sea of blue-haired patrons eating salmon fillets and Chicken à la King in the audience foretold something ominous about my future. There were several times during the run of the show when I nearly fell off the narrow thrust stage because I was so disoriented by the theater’s slushy signature cocktails flashing with blue, orange, and pink fiber optic lights at every table. I was sure that one night I’d take a tumble, crash onto overcooked poultry, and break my neck. Dying at a dinner theater, I knew, was worse than dying on the toilet.

I began drinking excessively with my castmates after each show, and, a month after I began working for Greg, arrived at his apartment with a debilitating hangover. I wasn’t ordinarily a coffee drinker, but I had bought myself a large latte that day, hoping the caffeine would allow me to focus on filing receipts. I sat down on Greg’s couch and the room began to spin as I filed and tried to eat my grilled chicken salad.

Taxi receipt for $15.73, tomato and feta tiered on the plastic fork; Pongsri Thai receipt, $36 (including tip), cucumber and artichoke heart. Bigger bites for bigger purchases: avocado, spinach, feta, hearts of palm, airline tickets, desktop computer. Just lettuce and celery for a receipt from Green Grocery coffee; a piece of grilled chicken for a single-ride subway card. Between each bite, a huge slurp of coffee. It was going pretty well, I thought.

“Brian, come here, I gotta show you this,” Greg called from his bedroom.

I went into his room to watch a video of Chita Rivera twirling on the Ed Sullivan show. The smell of the egg and cheese sandwich I had brought Greg that morning made my eyes cross.

As I watched the YouTube clip, slow, thick, guilty thoughts began insinuating themselves into my brain. I suddenly couldn’t bear that I was such a horrendous personal assistant. I was a fraud; I didn’t care what Greg needed, I had nothing but selfish motives for so diligently filing those receipts. And if I was honest with myself, it was too late in the season to be wearing tank tops, I was freezing, and I looked ridiculous. I thought I might throw myself out Greg’s seventeenth-story window if I had to consider his needs for one more day or dance while waiters refilled baskets of bread for one more night. Panic swelled in my brain, then seeped down my throat to my stomach.

Suddenly sweating, I found myself performing an odd sideways grapevine to the bathroom.

“Are you ok?” Greg asked.

“Yeah, oh yeah,” I said.

But before I could reach the bathroom, my bowels turned to liquid and began to gush. Tomato, feta, avocado, spinach, and a large latte ran in torrents down the backs of my legs. Slamming the door to the bathroom, I realized I was wearing underwear and a pair of $150 jeans that belonged not to me, but to a guy I had been dating.

After cleaning myself up and scrubbing those jeans as best I could, I managed to sneak to the hallway trash chute without Greg asking any questions. I threw away the balled up pair of underwear that wasn’t mine, then resumed sorting receipts in the living room, doing everything I could to stay out of Greg’s sniffing range for the next few hours.

But something had already shifted. What had been a warm, quiet smile between Greg and me was now an awkward grimace. Where he had once laughed easily at my inability to operate his scanner, there was now frustration and even disgust. I felt I had lost the advantage my relative youth and bare skin had given me over him, and now, when he gave me a look that conveyed what a lazy and selfish personal assistant I was, I could no longer pretend that look also might mean he felt the only solution was to marry me.

A few months went by. I should have offered to buy the guy I was dating a new pair of jeans but instead just washed the ones I’d sullied. The dinner theater production closed and I was cast as a dancing fork in a Houston production of Beauty and the Beast. I told Greg about the Houston gig, he sighed, told me he was proud of me, then said that while I was away he’d begin looking for a new assistant to permanently replace me.

When I arrived in Texas, there was a very cute forty-year old vegetarian yoga instructor playing the role of the Carpet. I decided I could get into yoga. The Carpet and I started to meditate and eat lentils together. We sautéed tofu and talked Buddhism between shows; I lent him my copy of The Secret, he lent me Siddhartha and Thomas Pynchon.

I returned to New York six weeks later, started collecting unemployment, lost touch with the Carpet, and decided tofu had no flavor. I continued living in a string of other people’s apartments, moving every year or two, subletting here, shacking up with a boyfriend there. Each time I moved, I’d leave things in those other people’s apartments, thinking that the version of myself that was going to live in the next place wouldn’t need that bookshelf or that Miles Davis poster or that halogen lamp or that painted coffee mug. As I moved from one job to the next and from one relationship to the next, I kept thinking I should go back to collect all the posters and bookshelves and mugs I had left scattered around the city, wondering if following their trail might lead me back to some other, better Brian I had discarded along the way.

October 28, 2011

Open Letters: An Open Letter to Every Woman Who Lives, Laughs, and Loves by Maggie Nugent

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Dear Girls who Live, Laugh, Love,

Tell me how it happened. I must know. Were you walking through the mall one day, and something in a home and furniture store caught your eye? It was a bronze picture frame, wasn’t it? It was classic, antique-y, very Martha Stewart; not something she’d feature in her magazine, but maybe something she would keep on the screen porch of her beach house in Maine. You saw it was embossed, and you took a closer look. LIVE LAUGH LOVE, it read. And you were like, oh, my God. OH, MY GOD.

Or were you looking through your friend’s photo album of her year in Nepal? It was a very life-changing experience for her, and you were very happy for her. You hoped to one day find meaning in your life, and you sighed discontentedly as you shut the album. And then, there it was! Right on the cover! Etched into the leather were three tiny words. LIVE LAUGH LOVE. And you were like, Oh… my God. OH, MY GOD! And you ran out of your friend’s dorm room and down the hall chanting your new mantra. LIVE. LAUGH. LOVE.

Was that how it happened? The reason I ask is just that I’m curious! Did you realize, right then and there, that you weren’t LIVING? If not, what were you doing? Were you not tasting the sweetness of the world’s best medicine, LAUGHING? Were you not LOVING in a way that would suggest that you’ve never been hurt before?

It’s not that I disagree with the words. Indeed, far from it. LIVING— yes! I do it every day, as far as I can tell. LAUGHING—check! I watch America’s Funniest Home Videos all the time, for that very reason! LOVING? I love many things. I fucking LOVE my dog and online scrabble. But that’s the thing. When I say LIVE, AFV, ONLINE SCRABBLE, no one’s re-blogging that shit. No one’s engraving it on their high school shop project, so I’m guessing there’s more to this than picking three arbitrary facts of life and photo-shopping it over the silhouette of a long-legged woman leaping against the sunset.

These are wise words, and I am to take them seriously, if I am to be welcomed into the community of those who LIVE LAUGH LOVE. I imagine it to be a very supportive community, where there is such an extraordinary level of understanding. For instance, perhaps someday I will have a job interview at a very fancy place. “Name a time in your life when you have showed great leadership,” the interviewer lady will say. And I will completely ignore the question. Instead I will say, “Have you ever LIVED, Ms. Henderson? Do you understand the value of LAUGHTER? Do you frequently revisit a certain emotion called LOVE?” And Ms. Henderson, my interviewer, will gasp softly. She will blink away tears. Without saying a word, she will slowly pull up the polyester sleeve of her navy blue pantsuit. She holds her wrist toward me, and I lean forward to meet her half way. There it is, tattooed on her wrist: LIVE LAUGH LOVE glowing brightly against her skin in immaculate Lucida Calligraphy. Breath-taking. And I know, without a word being exchanged, that I have not only been hired, but I have probably been hired for a position much more distinguished than that which I have applied for.

Or on the other hand, say I am eating dinner with the Queen, and something happens to tickle my funny bone, and I shoot my Dubonnet cocktail out of my nose, and she does NOT finding it amusing, and does NOT think, “Oh, what a charming girl, LIVING in such a way that so openly displays her LOVE of LAUGHTER!” I’m going to assume that she does NOT have VIVO RODIE AMO subtly engraved on the inside of her crown. Thus she is not in the club, thus she does not get it, and thus I should not feel so terrible about offending Her Majesty The Queen. Instead, I’ll have to clue her in on this phenomenon. I’ll explain everything, and pretty soon we’ll both be rolling around Windsor Castle, alive, laughing, hugging each other!

Am I right in all of this, Girls Who LIVE LAUGH LOVE? If I were to put a decal of this onto the back window of my car, will it all suddenly hit me like a ton of leather-bound photo albums? If I edit this into my favorite quotations on my Facebook page, am I in the club? Tell me what I must do! I wish to LIVE! I wish to LAUGH! I wish to LOVE! Pull me out of my own obscurity! Let me in! Is there a weekend retreat involved? A subscription I have to pay for? A special charm bracelet I have to wear? I’ll do anything, ladies. Enlighten me, please.

Sincerely,
Maggie Nugent

October 20, 2011

McSweeneys Recommends by The Editors of McSweeney’s

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Parenthood
We’re talking the TV show here, though the movie is also recommended. Created and run by the same team that was behind Friday Night Lights, you can see the similar DNA in the naturalism of the dialog. Not groundbreaking, just deeply satisfying television, which is worth a lot in our book.

Peanut butter cookies with mini M&M’s from Publix bakery
The overall quality of the in-store Publix baked goods is high, but these are the best. The cookie itself is moist and salty-sweet, when combined with the finishing chocolaty kick of the M&M’s makes for a gobbleable treat. Comes in a baker’s dozen package, which is nice.

Brad Listi’s Other People Podcast
There’s only like nine episodes as of this writing, but somehow this is good from the word go. It’s like listening to Marc Maron’s podcast, only with kickass writers, instead of comedians. Funny, pointed, thought-provoking. If there’s any justice in the world, this will become huge.

Embracing the new era of whistling in songs
No longer in the pale shadow of Andy Griffith or G’n’R’s “Patience,” we are over-blessed with a wonderment of these. From Alexander’s “Truth” to Andrew Bird (“Scythian Empire,” for one among many) to Wilco’s “Red Eyed and Blue” to we better stop or this’ll have to go over on the lists page, the whistle-as-instrument is once again effective and admired.

Roadside America, Shartlesville, PA
You will someday find yourself in central Pennsylvania, driving I-78 to find notice of “Roadside America: The World’s Greatest Indoor Miniature Village.” You will stop. You will enter. You will be wide-eyed, astonished by the intricacies and joyfulness of the very many little scenes set so carefully about this vast tiny world, not leaving, as instructed, until you witness the night pageant that runs every half hour. You will write to thank us.

The middle distance
Indisputably the best place to stare.

Revisiting Freaks and Geeks
We field-tested this. See if you can work it into an 18-24 month rotation. Wait for that one mid-season episode where Bill (Martin Starr) is eating grilled cheese and watching Garry Shandling. Revel in bliss.

Some revolutionary kind of ice cream container, a tub or box or firkin or whatever, but something where you don’t get the ice cream on your knuckles when you get the damn ice cream out
Invent this. Please.

The hand-written love letter
Some recommendations are self-evident, lord knows. But at least this one comes with the chance for a tender word, a thoughtful turn of phrase, an honest and living thanks for the affection of another, all embodied in the smudgy, organic handiwork of pen to crispy paper.

Revelator by Tedeschi Trucks Band
You could call it a supergroup since husband/wife Trucks and Tedeschi have had solo succes, except that you haven’t heard of most of these players because rather than being big-time famous, they’re just awesome. An amalgam of soul, funk, gospel, and blues and when the whole band is in the pocket, your breath will catch.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Funny, charming, moving, and written with a deft touch. This book is worth your time.

The Hour
Much has been made of this BBC America show’s similarities to Mad Men, (the late 1950s setting, the ever-present cigarette smoking) but we find it’s the acting and storytelling that really compare. Consider us hooked.

Pitch
Our card game of choice this summer. Play against two others or work with a partner in a game of two-on-two. Add a deck or rooftop, some fru-fru drinks and chips and dip, and you have yourselves a party.

The Cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki
You’re right if you think this is a backdoor way to recommend Tree of Life. We don’t usually know our cinematographers from our best boys. But holy Jesus, the visual masterpiece of that movie, of Lubezki working with Malick, regardless of whatever else anyone might say of it, the aesthetics make you appreciate that we live in a time when such things are still possible, that such beauty is still there to be found and made.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
Fascinating and hilarious. This book will make you reexamine everyone you know—particularly the jerks.

“Changing” by The Airborne Toxic Event
Yes, yes, the song is minor-league Modest Mouse, but just the same, it’s three and a half minutes of fun, sunny, tap-the-steering-wheel indie pop.

Emma Stone
We are entirely, completely on this bandwagon. Charm, wit, character and all.

Describing a singer’s voice as “serrated”
A friend of ours recently used that word, so perfect, so right, before which we too thought it was solely applicable to knife teeth. Go back and listen to, oh try this one, John McCauley, the Deer Tick guy, and you’ll see. It isn’t gruff or gravelly or raspy, or whatever Pitchfork will go to. It’s serrated.

My New American Life by Francine Prose
A pretty sharp satire of the America we live in that also manages to engender a good bit of sympathy for the characters inside.

Bond: The Paris Sessions by Gerald Clayton
A young jazz pianist, who has some Mehldau and McPartland in him. The tunes map a wide swath, but he’s at his best when the whole trio attacks simultaneously, everybody swinging without getting in each other’s way.

These Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
An oral history of ESPN filled with insider gossip and intrigue. Juicy and fascinating. If you are the sort of person who can and will watch the same SportsCenter three times in a row (and we are legion) this is a must read.

The Willow Rest in Gloucester, Massachusetts
Sandwiches. Order the sandwiches. You really can’t go wrong with any of them. The “Annisquam Delight” (turkey, brie, mixed greens, cranberry horseradish sauce and mayo)? Delightful! The “Riverdale” (black forest ham, swiss, lettuce, tomato and honey mustard)? Riverdance-able! “The Route 127” (tomato, mozzarella, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil and drizzled with balsamic glaze)? Route-127-sational!

The Yale Digital Commons
Yale is the first Ivy League university to open its digital image archive to the public. The collection’s 250,000 “digital assets” include over 8,000 images of ancient globular bowls, 4,000 photographs of historical scientific instruments, 900 maps of Tanzania, and 20 paintings of donkeys.

Skiffle
Skiffle was a 1920s popular music genre with a jug-band ethos and roots in New Orleans jazz. Homemade instruments were essential to the skiffle sound, from comb-and-paper kazoos to cigar-box fiddles. The term disappeared from the American scene in the 1940s but returned in Britain with the 1950s folk revival.

John Goodman’s screen debut
It’s come to our attention that Goodman first appeared in a film called Jailbait Babysitter. IMDB sets the scene: “Vicki is seventeen and her older friends call her ‘Jailbait.’ Her boyfriend Robert is frustrated because Vicki doesn’t want to do the wild thing, but he’s willing to wait…” We’ll stop there. Thank god for Raising Arizona.

Electric Warrior by T. Rex
This is T. Rex’s best album, and we rank “Girl,” “Cosmic Dancer,” and “Life’s a Gas” as its standout tracks. We’ll never stop listening, no matter how many ridiculous stunts Marc Bolan is rumored to have pulled (we heard he named his son Rolan Bolan).

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Did we forget to mention how much we dig this novel? It won the Pulitzer Prize this year, sure, but for the record we loved it first.

Folkstreams.net
It’s a “National Preserve of Documentary Films About American Roots Cultures.” You can browse by subject (women, music, rural life) or region (Pacific Northwest, Appalachia, Southwest) and you’ll find over 150 instantly streamable films with titles like Sadobabies: Runaways in San Francisco; Fishing all My Days: Florida Shrimping Traditions; and I Ain’t Lying: Folktales from Mississippi.

My Korean Deli: How I Risked My Career and Mortgaged My Future for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe
A laugh-out-loud memoir by a former editor of The Paris Review that details his experience owning and operating a Korean Deli in Brooklyn with his wife and mother-in-law. This book is the very definition of delightful.

“Price Tag” by Jessie J
About as infectious as a pop song can get.

Richard Lawson’s American Idol recaps
It’s relatively easy to be snarky, especially when American Idol is concerned, but Lawson gets so much hilarious mileage out of the show that he raises the ubiquitous TV-recap genre to a new comic level.

Honey mustard
Put it on anything: sandwiches, seafood, pretzels. You won’t be disappointed.

The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone
Rathbone’s narrator is a seventeen-year-old boy in a juvenile detention center. It will be called a coming-of-age story, good ole Bildungsroman, and it is. It’s also fun and funny (remember that books are entertaining, and possibly, in cases like this, more so than a movie?), with the author giving impressive attention and care to every paragraph.

Stove-top popcorn
It doesn’t really take any longer to cook than microwaved popcorn. Admittedly, we weren’t aware of that before. It also doesn’t have the god-knows-what chemicals of that microwave bag. Plus, more new information for us, it tastes all kinds of better.

The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard
Some of you will be familiar with Ms. Pittard’s particular magic from the pages of our print journal. This is a stunning first novel told in the first person plural with devastating results.

Highway Rider by Brad Mehldau
Longtime readers of the Recommends recognize our general fondness for Mehldau, and here, he steps out of the comfort-zone of the trio and gives us a fully-realized album-length composition that leans heavily on the trio (with additions from Joshua Redman on sax) and a full orchestra on others. The album demands that you listen to the entire thing every time you play it.

Misfits
Another smart, crass, and captivating British dramedy about disaffected youth (see our rec of Skins below), but with a supernatural twist. Saying too much about it would risk ruining the show’s many surprises, so just watch the thing (all 13 episodes of its first two seasons are available for viewing on YouTube). You won’t be disappointed.

Early Girl Eatery in Asheville, NC
Unpretentious, fresh ingredients, great specials every day. The sweet potato scramble is especially recommended. After eating, wander down the street and around the corner to spend some time at Malaprops Books.

Full-stop.net
A recently launched website for endlessly insightful contemporary lit reviews and author interviews. From their “About” section: “Full Stop is a new site committed to an earnest, expansive, and rigorous discussion of literature and literary culture. Despite the popular critical sentiment that the ‘death of the novel’ is upon us, we submit that the opposite is true and refute the fatalism inherent in a narrative that threatens to ignore the diversity and quality of contemporary fiction.” A site after our own heart.

Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle”
We might’ve recommended any number of remarkable Redding hits, but this one—perhaps put in a playlist against The Black Crowes’s remake and thus shaming it—is top shelf. Hey, why not go big money, buy the whole posthumous The Immortal Otis Redding and revel.

The poetry of Wislawa Szymborska
She’s Polish, she’s a Nobel Prize winner, her poems are humane, grounded, and wise. We finally caught up with the octogenarian and her work. Apologies for the tardiness.

Abner Jay’s album One Man Band
Aber Jay was an eccentric ragtime-y multi-instrumentalist of recent (sadly postmortem) acclaim. On this album you’ll find songs about cocaine addiction, depression, Vietnam and venereal disease. You’ll also find jokes, plenty of them, sung and spoken, filthy and clean. An engrossing and sporadically deranged mosaic of earnest weariness and meandering humor.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
A funny, smart, and poignant time travel/existential crisis/father-son-themed novel.

Kranthout
It means “newspaper wood” in Dutch, and that’s what it is. It’s wood made from compressed newspaper (which, in case you’ve forgotten, is made from wood). It was designed by Mike Meijer for design company vj5 and it’s cheap, sustainable and crazy-looking, as you can still see bits and pieces of celebrity mugshots in the grain.

The chorus to Alan Jackson’s country hit “Chattahoochee”
This part of the song is about driving down to the river after the working week is over and drinking a lot of beers, so many beers that you can build a pyramid of empty cans, which you can only see by moonlight because you’re deep in the wildwood, on the far side of a threshold beyond which artificial light is forbidden to pass. Jackson’s got it right—the sun reflecting off the moon reflecting off your pyramid of silver cans is truly a miraculous thing.

The snowplow plowing snow toward the other side of your street
Out of our control, but when it happens, especially given all the snow this season, it’s like Christmas for our backs.

Lesbian bars
Jonathan Richman differentiates between lesbian bars and regular bars thusly: “In the first bar things were so controlled, but in this bar things were way way bold—I was dancing in a lesbian bar, ooh!”

TV shows inside TV shows
Think “Sick Sad World” from Daria and “Cookie Party” from The Sarah Silverman Program. I would like to see these fictional shows turned into real shows.

EnglishRussia.com
You have to get your browser dirty to uncover this site’s treasures, but they’re worth it. Consider the post “Creepy Children’s Playgrounds,” which features photos of horrifying, neglected Soviet-era play structures with captions like “Elephant addict,” “Sadistic inclinations,” “Mutated turnip,” “Decapitated monkeys,” “Sinister hare from a children’s camp,” and “Impious playground.”

Silent Light
An elegant, gentle film about a rural Mexican Mennonite who weighs lust and romance against lacerating guilt as he repeatedly betrays his faithful wife with another Mennonite woman. The perfectly restrained dialogue is spoken in both Spanish and Plautdeitsch, or Mennonite Low German.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
Roach has written yet another entertaining and witty science book, this one about the basic logistical problems of space travel (food, sleep, hygiene, waste). After reading the chapter on space toilets we have a new appreciation of what it means to be an astronaut and a hero.

Truffettes All Natural Chocolate Truffles
We’ve only see these at Costco, and even then mostly during the holiday season, but maybe they’re available elsewhere as well. Dusted in cocoa powder, the first taste is perfectly bitter followed by a melting sweet chocolate goodness. You’ll want to eat more than you should, but we don’t recommend that.

“Staring Out the Window” by Fulton Lights
A dazzling, churning, all-encompassing piece of indie pop.

La Maison en Petits Cubes
This one is better left recommended without overwrought commentary. Except to say that clearing your desk for a clean 12-minute time slot to google and then watch this animated Japanese short is about right.

The orange properties in Monopoly
We’ll go to our grave defending this Monopoly strategy. Obviously you buy St. James, Tennessee, and New York if given the chance. Low-investment, high return. But also make any deal necessary to secure this Orange trinity if some hack ends up buying them before you. Negotiate, trade, connive, whatever, just get them. So many people go to jail, there’s more traffic coming up that side of the board than others. Orange always wins the game.

RSA animated lectures
These are something else. The RSA is the London-based Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. These animated lectures are visual companions to fuller lectures hosted by the RSA. So, you know, you don’t have to be a David Harvey acolyte or a Slavoj Zizek student to keep up.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
About as highbrow as a third-person action and adventure video game can get. Set in early 16th-century Italy (mostly), you walk the streets and hop the roofs of Rome, trying to take the city back from the evil control of the Templars. There’s plenty of killing to do, but we instead often find ourselves collecting famous artwork or climbing towers for grandiose views of the city. Oh, and Leonardo da Vinci is your best pal!

Rikki Ililonga
The so-called “godfather” of Zam-rock, Zambian funk rock that first came of age in the 70’s. It’s funky, it’s bright, it’s joyful. It’s available in a box set from NowAgain Records, but Ililonga solo, and with his band, Musi-O-Tunya.

Skins
This British TV show is like a cross between Freaks and Geeks and American Pie. It’s not perfect (the adults are cartoonish and the storylines occasionally fall victim to melodrama), but every episode we’ve seen so far (Netflix streaming!) has at least one or two “wow” moments.

Baker’s boxes
Use these for just about any delivery. Those white boxes, with brown unbleached interior. A thin string or solid-colored ribbon to tie it all up is okay, but we’re surprised it took us this long to realize that the sharp simplicity of un-paper-wrapped boxes has an elegance we usually can’t pull off….

October 17, 2011

FLIP: A Column About Skateboarding: Column 18: The Last Toy Machine Demo of the Summer by Joel Rice

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: blonde, celebrity, dog, fun, heart, kids, men, mom, phone, politician, video — Comments Off

On an oppressively hot, late-August afternoon, professional skateboarder Leo Romero—along with other members of the Toy Machine and Foundation skateboard teams—appeared at a downtown skatepark for their final demo of the summer.

Most skateboard “demos” follow a similar template, or protocol. Usually the event begins with a skateboard demonstration in which the visiting grandees display their physical prowess, followed by a signing in which the skaters sit behind a table and autograph t-shirts, posters, hard-goods, body parts and the occasional baby. The event often culminates in a “product toss” during which the visiting athletes hurl—as a bride her bouquet—complimentary clothing, stickers and/or skateboard equipment into a rapacious throng. In tone, demos are not dissimilar to a politician’s campaign stop. Like a rally its purpose is to stoke positive associations, make common cause, burnish a brand.

Toy Machine’s final demo of the summer—held at a downtown skate-shop/indoor skate-park in a medium-sized Southern urban center—hewed closely to the long established rhythms and rituals of this received form.

A PORTRAIT OF THE CROWD JUST BEFORE THE TOY MACHINE DEMO STARTED

Prior to the commencement of the demo a reporter—standing on an observation deck which offered wide views of the recently refurbished mini ramp and street course—bore witness to several parent/child interactions. One visibly frustrated father— paunching in a grey t-shirt, plaid shorts and shoulder length (what appeared to be) dyed blonde hair—shrilly ordered his young son to dismount from the mini-ramp. “Pearson, damn it!” he yelled. He rushed down the stairs as his son insolently “got air” on the ramp. In more sanguine moods, several mothers sat in chairs against the wall. There they talked amongst themselves or typed at laptops, absently checked BlackBerrys and other smart phones, as if the activity their children were engaged in down below were nothing more exceptional, nor less wholesome, than chess club or fencing. (Skateboarding is in the midst of a soccer-mom renaissance.) A reporter asked one father—he with shoulder-length grey hair and glasses with an aviator bar—if he had ever partaken of skateboarding’s pleasures. “Not a lick. Not a lick,” he lilted. “We were into dirt bikes and waterskiing. We didn’t have a lot of concrete out in the country.”

Among the adolescents, clothing associated with Deathwish, a skateboard company, was commonplace. One African-American youth wore a blue baseball cap which simply read DEATHWISH.

A tawny-toned adolescent, with short dreadlocks and a shirt depicting the rapper Old Dirty Bastard in the style of the iconic Shepard Fairey posters of President Barack Obama, was standing by the barricade.

Was Mr. Romero his favorite skater? “Nah. Antwuan Dixon,” he replied. Mr. Dixon, who rides for Deathwish, is nearly as well known for his legal struggles, florid substance abuse problems and extensive facial tattoos, as for his skating. Given his self-destructive tendencies one might wonder if Mr. Dixon himself has a deathwish. But Dixon is also, as our interviewee correctly stated, an exceptional talent. “His style is, like, sick,” he added. “Everything is so cool about it.”

What, asked a reporter, about the tattoos? “It’s cool, but I wouldn’t do it. He got it, I think, because he got rich as a skateboarder, so he just thinks, ‘Ok, I can do it now.’ Plus it kind of goes with the whole skater lifestyle.”

An overweight adolescent—black hair streaked with purple, an isolated air— clutched a Deathwish skateboard as though it possessed talismanic significance. Who was his favorite skateboarder?

“Rob Dyrdek,” he said. “And then on Deathwish, there is a British guy. I can’t remember his name.”

ROMERO

Soon Leo Romero, the man of the hour, strode towards the mini-ramp for a warm up. By far Toy Machine’s most prominent rider, Mr. Romero is a sinewy, shaggy-haired 25-year-old and the most recent winner of Thrasher magazine’s Skater of the Year award, still one of the sport’s highest honors, its most prestigious post. His celebrity within skateboarding was not such that the crowd immediately surged towards him. He was not mobbed. But the whispers and stolen glances made clear many registered his presence, knew that they were in the presence of greatness.

Indeed, Romero has what skateboarding has sorely lacked of late—a touch of drama, actual attitude.

A diminutive and slightly built Mexican-American, he was wearing a plain white T-shirt, arm tattoos, a pencil mustache (sometimes referred to as a “scumstash”), fitted but not “skinny” matte-blue jeans with large cuffs and a green mesh-back Toy Machine hat emblazoned with buttons and a giant white eye. The high, rough-hewn ridge of Romero’s nose lends his face a faintly savage aspect, as if obsidian had been interred between his eyes. There was a classic-Americana-folk-hero-Dean Moriarty-in-On-the-Road-quality both to his attire and quietly commanding persona.

(It brings to mind a conversation this reporter once had at a cocktail party in Cairo, Egypt of all places. An erudite Egyptian attorney, with a donnish accent he had acquired at Oxford, said, “The best thing about America is the misfits.” Though that conversation also occurred in stifling summer heat, the speaker in that instance wore a grey tweed suit, a blue contrast collar shirt.)

Expertly and without incident, Romero dropped into the mini ramp, threaded through clutches of young children. With pendulous-power he executed a textbook perfect blunt to fakie that made the most satisfying snapping sound.

THE DEMO DURING WHICH WE ARE REMINDED WHY KICKFLIPS WERE ONCE CALLED “MAGIC FLIPS”

A proprietor of the skate shop had assumed the MC duties and, into a booming microphone, issued a warm and hearty welcome to the visiting dignitaries. The 200 or so spectators had assumed positions along the grey metal barricades that lined the street course, the observation deck, and the top portion of the mini-ramp. Loud pop-music began playing on the sound-system.

A one-armed individual with a camera stood in the middle of the course photographing the proceedings. The professional skateboarder Dan Murphy’s small dog, Indy, also ran throughout the course dodging the skaters in a practiced fashion, sometimes stopping to watch the action unfold.

In years past there was a great gulf between how skateboarders performed on video, and how they performed in person. Not so with today’s top-tier. Now an attendee at a demo can reasonably expect to see exactly the same caliber of tricks performed in person as they have seen performed on film.

But even by these elevated standards, Mr. Romero’s skating is something to behold. Though the other skaters acquitted themselves admirably, he was clearly the star. You see why he is Skater of the Year.

As a giant, black and white poster of Johnny Cash glowered upon the scene, Romero began with a fakie ollie fakie 5-0 on the “hubba” ledge. With a martial artist’s assurance he then threw in a massive backside 180 kickflip for good measure. The Velvet Underground song “Rock & Roll” reverberated… It was alright…

Whereas countless professional skateboarders have ridden handrails by approaching them from the top and riding down, Romero is hailed for having been one of the first to grind and slide up rails from the bottom up. Many in the crowd were surely hoping to see Romero’s paradigm shifting, trademark tricks, to see him grind or slide up something.

They were not to be disappointed.

After personally waxing “the hubba” with his own wedge of wax, Romero made a small handful of attempts to crooked grind up the ledge, quickly meeting with success. [A hubba is a wide ledge which slopes downward like a handrail. “Hubbas” were originally christened by professional skateboarder James Kelch in reference to a specific ledge near San Francisco’s Embarcadero plaza, where persons would congregate to smoke crack cocaine, at the time colloquially known as “hubbas”.] Romero then, after only a few tries, noseblunted up the hubba. The crowd clapped and cried out. Wasting no time he rolled back to the same ledge and landed a fakie ollie, fakie 5-0 backside 180 out. Then, as a finale, Romero proceeded to kickflip up two giant steps. They were huge steps and he kickflipped up them and not off a bump or anything, just a flat ground kickflip that went up and across something very high and very long. Just jumping as high as he did would have been something of a feat, let alone getting that useless wooden toy to follow after you, flipping in the air. It’s almost not skateboarding anymore. It’s practically parkour.

“There it is!” the M.C. exalted and the crowd cheered and The Who’s “Baba O’ Riley” reached its crescendo.

It’s only teenage wasteland…Oh, yeah…

END ON A POIGNANT NOTE

Was the demo a success? Mike Sinclair, Toy Machine’s team manager, thought so. “I couldn’t ask for anything better. There was air conditioning. A bunch of kids showed up. Leo is on it. He loves skating so he’s amped up every time. He gets the kids hyped, you know? I’d say the kid’s here are generally more stoked because they don’t get to see the pros every day. In San Diego you can see them at the supermarket.”

“Leo skated rad,” said the one-armed photographer.

A blond 14-year-old, who sported a Confederate flag sticker on her white helmet, reached this verdict. “I thought he was pretty beast.”

In preparation for the product toss Toy Machine rider Matt Bennett, who would not look out of place were he to be photoshopped into a vintage Woodstock crowd scene, brought out a beautiful neon orange deck emblazoned with a giant cyclopean eye. Soon the crowd scrambled after it the way fans at a baseball game go after homerun balls.

As the signing wound down and the crowd began to thin, Mr. Romero stood behind the table on top of an obstacle known as a “pyramid.”

What, a reporter wondered, was his impression of the demo? “It was chill. It’s great having fun, skating with your friends. Luckily Toy Machine is a really awesome, laid back team when it comes to responsibilities and stuff,” said Mr. Romero. “Mostly everybody on the team knows what they have to do and they do it.”

Was Mr. Romero sad to see the season end? Was this—the last Toy Machine demo of the summer—a poignant occasion? Somehow bittersweet? He took a moment to reflect. “I’m flying home tomorrow. It was pretty much a mellow trip. We went to this strip club today called Gabrielle’s. It’s here in town,” he said. “We were the only people actually in the strip club. That’s the first time that has ever happened… But, it’s been a great summer.”

October 12, 2011

The Point of My Instructional Video is That You Cant Understand It by Jamie Brew

by admin — Categories: Fun Stuff — Tags: babies, men, video — Comments Off

Modern audiences are lazy. They want instructional videos to tie every idea up in a neat, labeled, easy-to-open bundle. I am above such foolery. I prefer to challenge my viewers, not insult them with drivel. And yet, judging by the one-star average rating displayed in the toolbar beneath the video, you pathetic plebeians have somehow failed to grasp this.

How to Take Care of Your Fish is not intended for the dull. For 203 minutes it demands your full attention, really requires you to think. Take the opening sequence, in which the woman drowns in a fish tank full of paint. Now think: is the whole scene happening inside the woman’s head? Why does the Bengal tiger looking into the tank from above dissolve into a cloud of ash as the woman dies? Is it a good idea to fill your fish tank with blue paint? I leave the answers intentionally ambiguous; each viewer must discover them through scrupulous introspection.

Can’t you see that the film’s whole point is that there are some things we cannot know? That fish care is so immeasurably complex it defies understanding? You’re supposed to come away from my film questioning whether it is even possible to replace a fish tank’s filter.

After all, what can anyone honestly claim to know about fish tank maintenance? Yes, we might speculate that cleaning implements are possibly involved, or that the activity potentially concerns fish in some capacity. But beyond this? It is folly. We mortals fret over choosing the right fish food. We wonder what temperature we should set the tank to. Why, we may as well wonder how to prepare an eggplant or fill out income tax returns! Such unknowable things, such sublime truths are, and shall forever remain, tantalizingly beyond the grasp of the greatest human minds.

That’s exactly the idea I was driving at in the part where everything turns inside out and the narrator starts talking in super-slowed-down German.

Don’t expect me to spoon feed my message to you. You’re not babies. I don’t want to waste my time making instructional films for babies. I refuse to look at babies, change babies, or have anything at all to do with babies. Honestly, I thought I had implied as much in my 2009 instructional film How to Play With Babies.

So please, tell me, what do you mean when you say that my film “should be more straightforward”? That not every character should have worn a clown mask? That the audible sobbing in the background of the entire film should have remained at a constant volume instead of fluctuating from whisper-quiet to outright deafening? Perhaps that there should have been fish in the video? Ha! Not every single instructional fish care film conforms so meekly to trite conventions like the inclusion of fishes or instructions about how to care for them.

In the end, I can only hope that my film conveys even the palest shade of the helplessness I feel confronted with fish care’s limitless subtlety. I seek to expose the human condition. To find that lofty elegiac vein that mirrors all our struggles in this whirling incoherent world. To wrestle with fish care and then transcend it! If that much wasn’t obvious, maybe you need to watch How to Take Care of Your Fish again. Try paying attention this time.

October 11, 2011

The Chorus Boy Chronicles: Grin and Bare It by Brian Spitulnik

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Eight months after my boyfriend of three years dumped me for no longer being twenty-two, I shaved off all my hair, became a vegetarian, and took the advice of the guys in my dressing when they said the only way to win that boyfriend back was to get myself ready.

By ready, they meant I should be willing to sleep with anyone in possession of a gym membership. They meant I should be willing to sacrifice a meal so that if my clothes came off at two a.m. there’d be an audible “wow” directed at my torso from the guy taking off my clothes. They meant that I should give up all other ambitions—like preparing for auditions or maintaining friendships—in order to get serious about becoming snatched. So I started going to the gym seven days a week, eating nothing but bananas and raw almonds, and taking blood-red Hydroxycut diet pills three times a day. Hearing words like ripped, shredded, and cut in reference to my body became the sole focus of my waking hours; I’d search those words out in conversation with a sweaty desperation, like a fat kid hunting Cadbury Easter eggs.

All that effort to win back my ex-boyfriend culminated in a friend suggesting that I sign up to perform in Broadway Bares, an annual benefit produced by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. I had been looking at pictures and videos of almost-naked dancers participating in Bares since my days as a freshman Musical Theater major in football-and-frat-centric Ann Arbor. But when I moved to New York, I could never quite bring myself to sign up for the fundraiser. I’d start sweating at the thought of it; my insides would liquefy and gurgle, a voice in my head would say that performing in Bares was reserved for hot chorus boys, not Jewish boys from the D.C. suburbs who had shopped in the “husky” section of department stores until they were twelve. I had even avoided going to see the show year after year, feeling sure that my childhood rabbi would be standing at the theater entrance, shaking his head and muttering, get back to eating your kugel, boychik as he rocked back and forth on his heels, pounding his chest and rolling his eyes toward God.

But that summer, my fifth in New York, I decided there was no better way to incite a furious jealousy, and subsequent longing, in my ex than by stripping for thousands of people in the very show that he and I had always classified as just so not us. So I signed up. It was for a good cause, after all.

As my friends performing with me in the fundraiser began actually raising funds, I contributed to the effort by upping my dosage of Hydroxycut from nine to twelve pills a day. May turned to June, my muscles weakened, I could no longer lift the women I was contracted to lift in Chicago, and the manufacturers of Hydroxycut pulled their pills from the market because about half a dozen people had died from its side effects. But, still in possession of a two month supply myself, I soldiered on in the name of charity and of winning back a man who I was sure would see the error of his ways once my body fat count had dropped below two-percent.

The day of the Bares performances, I leapt out of bed at the sound of my 7 a.m. alarm. I sat on the floor for twenty minutes, chanting the mantra my meditation teacher had given me, then popped four Hydroxycut pills into my mouth. I got in the shower and, without turning on the water, shaved all my body hair off using an electric clipper whose metal razor got so hot I scarred a patch of skin on my right forearm. I dressed and sat down for a breakfast of one banana and five almonds. I stuffed sweatpants, jazz shoes, and a dance belt into my backpack, my fingers visibly shaking from the Hydroxycut-enhanced adrenaline rush. Before heading out the door, I lifted my T-shirt to assess the reflection of my torso in the bathroom mirror. Tears burned my eyes: my torso was very nearly flawless.

I arrived at Roseland Ballroom at nine, ready for the tech rehearsal and looking like a hairless, malnourished Pekingese puppy. I was performing in the finale of the show, so while I waited for my turn to rehearse, I got to sit and watch the other performers. But instead of watching the rehearsal and enjoying the fact that I was in the company of performers my husky ten-year-old self would have given his entire Jem and the Holograms doll collection to be near, I was busy watching the performers who were not on stage. Congregated in clumps around the seat-less, concrete-floored venue, dancers were laughing and chatting, their fingers suspiciously un-shaky as they bit into egg sandwiches and the cream cheese-slathered bagels provided by the Bares producers.

During the rehearsals leading up to Bares, I had been under the impression that everyone was engaging in the kind of self-deprivation I was; everyone looked hungry, I’d thought, just no one wanted to talk about it. The choreography for the finale was intentionally simplistic—no big turning sequences, no leaps or intricate partnering work—so being hungry and slightly dizzy hadn’t been a problem. The focus of the number was not the choreography, anyway. It was all about the costumes, which made the eight dancers—four boys, four girls—into crossbreeds of various types of flora, fauna, and disco balls. We were instructed to parade around the stage, moving our limbs however our given characters might organically express themselves. My character was moss. I did my best to look fuzzy and slow moving.

Chicago was scheduled to perform two shows that Sunday, so after going through the light cues for the Bares finale, I arrived at the Ambassador Theater on 49th Street at one-thirty p.m., performed the Chicago matinee, ran back to Roseland on 51st for a Bares dress rehearsal, then sprinted back to the Ambassador for another show at 7. The first Bares performance was to begin at 9:30, so when the curtain came down on the second show at Chicago, I ran to the stage door of Roseland for the third time that day. I was directed up three flights of stairs to a room marked MAKEUP. I could hear from the monitors piping music throughout the backstage area that the show had already begun.

I peeked my head into the makeup room and a group of five people dressed all in black stepped toward me, each holding a tub in one hand and a large paintbrush in the other. “Well?” one person said. “Strip!”

I threw my T-shirt, shorts, and boxer briefs into a corner and cupped my hands over my freshly shorn nether region. As the five makeup artists began slathering green paint onto every area of me, my mind groped for justifications. It’s for charity, I told myself. My ex will see this and die. I have abs. I have great abs.

One of the makeup people told me to stand with my legs further apart as a reporter from Paper magazine asked me my name, what Broadway show I was in, and how it felt to be painted green. “It tickles,” I said, just when I thought I couldn’t sink any lower into self-loathing.

When I was green from the tips of my hair to the cracks between my toes, the makeup artists began throwing handfuls of green glitter over the still-wet paint. I could hear through the monitors that we were two numbers away from the finale. I was instructed to close my eyes as glitter was lobbed at my face, and my body began to sway. I forced a smile, hoping that they would all think I was enjoying the sensation of being glittered, which felt vaguely akin to being trapped in a cloud of egg-laying gnats. With my eyes closed, the room had begun to spin, and though I knew my feet were indeed on the floor, I had the distinct impression that I was falling. I wasn’t sure when the last time I’d eaten had been, and I didn’t want to think about it. I snapped my eyes open, saying, “I have to be on stage. I have to go.” I pulled on the moss-covered g-string that was my costume, ran down the three flights of stairs, past a blur of bare-skinned dancers, through a tunnel of lights, into total darkness, and out onto the stage.

If I had fallen down or passed out, I might have learned a nice, neat lesson about self-respect and the virtues of moderation and the perils of pill popping. But it didn’t happen that way. According to friends who were on stage with me that night, I executed the choreography without incident; I funneled my twenty-something years of dance training into a convincing portrayal of glittery, naked moss, and, after the show, joined the other dancers bumping and grinding at the edge of the stage, allowing audience members to stuff wads of cash into our g-strings to be later counted towards the $808,819 raised that night. But I didn’t remember a thing about the two performances I gave at Roseland, and certainly had no concept at the time of there being a greater good of the event beyond the condition of my torso.

What I did remember was that I had expected the backstage scene between the 9:30 and midnight shows to mirror a ‘70s sex party, complete with whips, chains, and lines of coke being snorted off butt cracks and boobs. Instead, I found myself in the middle of something that felt like a summer camp reunion. Two hundred dancers milled around, exclaiming at how wonderful everyone looked, snapping pictures with the celebrity presenters, primly fixing a snapped g-string or unstable headpiece. I was only able to mingle with the other performers for a moment or two before being ushered back up to the third floor to have my body paint touched up and wonder what I had been so worked up about.

The show that had begun at midnight ended around 2 a.m., and while the other performers put on street clothes and headed to the cast party, I spent an hour in the shower of a friend’s nearby apartment trying to scrub myself clean of green paint and thoroughly staining the white tiles and towel he’d lent me. By the time I got to the after party, strips of paint still covered swaths of my neck and legs, and the bouncer at the door of the bar said it was last call and they weren’t letting anyone else in.

Somewhat relieved and suddenly feeling like I was wearing a T-shirt made of lead, I hailed a cab and headed back to my Astoria apartment. There, I made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and had to pound half of it out of my esophagus before I realized I was swallowing the thing without chewing. I watched the sky outside my bedroom window turn grey then pink as the hour neared five-thirty. Stretching out on my bed, I could feel just how sore and exhausted my body was, but my mind was a screaming toddler, unwilling to settle into sleep after so much stimulation. Without really intending to, I began sifting through every sidelong look and conversation I’d had that day, checking for any scraps of validating praise for my body I might have missed. When I realized that really no one had cared what I looked like—aside from the attention-grabbing green body paint—I was furious and thought seriously about making myself a second sandwich.

That was the summer I turned twenty-seven. It had not been all that long since I moved to New York, turned twenty-two, and met my now ex-boyfriend. But it certainly felt like an eternity at the time. That summer, my twenty-seventh, was the summer I came to acknowledge that I had told my ex-boyfriend a fairly long list of lies, all of which had seemed harmless at the time, but had piled up, and, in the end, mattered. I had told him I didn’t mind dampening my own ambitions to make him more comfortable and that I enjoyed not knowing what New York was like without him and that I never wondered if there was someone other than him who could make me happy. They were all lies, and even at twenty-two, I had known enough to resent him, and myself, for wanting to believe them; but at the time, resentment hadn’t seemed to matter any more than the lies themselves.

That was also the summer I realized my genetics, which had been passed down from peasants in the shtetls of Ukraine, were ultimately going to win; it gets cold in Ukraine and my people are meant to carry around extra padding on their stomachs for warmth. Thinking about my great- and great-great grandparents after performing in Bares, I also had to acknowledge that if being one of the hot Broadway chorus boys meant being unrecognizable beneath green paint and a malnourished body, then there might be other goals worth setting my mind on achieving.

But lying in bed as the sun came up over the low-slung row homes of Queens, I poked at my stomach to see if the sandwich I’d just eaten had betrayed me by showing itself beneath my skin. It hadn’t. Feeling grateful, I tried to count backwards from one hundred to coax my mind into shutting down for the night, but instead started to plan. I’d wake up after a few hours of sleep, meditate, take my three diet pills, and eat my five almonds. I would still be twenty-six for another month. There was still time to stay up all night, to starve myself into perfection, to try to win back an ex I wasn’t so sure I actually wanted, and still, none of it would matter. At least not for another month or so. For another month, I’d stay snatched—and a little lightheaded—and ready.

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December 2, 2011

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Gold-I (Pandas) Package: $69.99

Gold-II (Grab Bag) Package: $69.99

Platinum (Wedding) Package: $79.99

November 18, 2011

Strategy I: Create One Productos Extremeños — Getafe, Spain The ‘Bocata Karen’: Wheat bread, chicken, brie, lettuce, honey and apples.

Strategy II: Earn It R U Hungry? — New Brunswick, New Jersey The Fat Maleman: Cheesesteak, mozzarella sticks, marinara, bacon, hot peppers, French fries, named for Voorhees, New Jersey mail carrier Dave Goldstein.

Strategy III: Be A Celebrity Flashback Diner — Boca Raton, Florida The Elton John: Charbroiled chicken breast topped with cheddar cheese and bacon.

Strategy V: Befriend A Chef The Blackstone Hotel — Omaha, Nebraska The Reuben: Rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut, named for Reuben Kulakofsky (Disclaimer: This is one of several origin stories of the Reuben and should not be taken as sandwich gospel.)

November 14, 2011

November 8, 2011

October 28, 2011

October 28, 2011

October 20, 2011

October 17, 2011

A PORTRAIT OF THE CROWD JUST BEFORE THE TOY MACHINE DEMO STARTED

ROMERO

THE DEMO DURING WHICH WE ARE REMINDED WHY KICKFLIPS WERE ONCE CALLED “MAGIC FLIPS”

END ON A POIGNANT NOTE

October 12, 2011

October 11, 2011

Strategy I: Create One
Productos Extremeños — Getafe, Spain
The ‘Bocata Karen’: Wheat bread, chicken, brie, lettuce, honey and apples.

Strategy II: Earn It
R U Hungry? — New Brunswick, New Jersey
The Fat Maleman: Cheesesteak, mozzarella sticks, marinara, bacon, hot peppers, French fries, named for Voorhees, New Jersey mail carrier Dave Goldstein.

Strategy III: Be A Celebrity
Flashback Diner — Boca Raton, Florida
The Elton John: Charbroiled chicken breast topped with cheddar cheese and bacon.

Strategy V: Befriend A Chef
The Blackstone Hotel — Omaha, Nebraska
The Reuben: Rye bread, corned beef, Swiss cheese and sauerkraut, named for Reuben Kulakofsky
(Disclaimer: This is one of several origin stories of the Reuben and should not be taken as sandwich gospel.)