Five things I want for Father's Day: 1. Fool On the Hill 1ST Edition Signed, from Powells.com 2. Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and anything else on my Amazon.com wish list. 3. Gift Card from Midtown Comics. 4. A 2004 Mini Cooper S. 5. El Nopalito Boutique & Restaurant in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. (pictured)
On Saturday, I lost my glasses on Nitro (the roller coaster at Great Adventure), a fitting epilogue to the tough lesson that was Friday's watershed louder than words show. I had low expectations for the Friday slot to begin with, but twenty-one paid in the audience - the majority of whom were supportive friends/co-workers from outside of the poetry scene and much of the extended Acentos family - was even worse than I'd expected. Glaringly absent were many of the usual suspects from the scene, or as one person put it, those most likely to be on the receiving end…
What's your personality? You are an ENTP! As an ENTP, you are Extraverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving. This makes your primary focus on Extraverted Intuition with Introverted Thinking. This is defined as a NT personality, which is part of Carl Jung's Rational (Knowledge Seeking) type, and more specifically the Inventors or Visionary. As a weblogger, your love for a discussion may cause you to debate things more often. You might also flit from idea to idea, not completing one before going to the next. Your largest sense is intution, which makes you a good at understanding what is going on…
Yummy Sandwich. Yummy Sandwich. Yummy Sandwich. Yummy Sandwich. Yummy Sandwich. [I want to make sure this gets picked up by any Google searches for these ignorant bastards.] Yummy Sandwich is one of those "take-in" lunch services that corporations sign on with to keep you from wasting their time by leaving your desk and going outside for lunch. In their PowerPoint presentation, they break down the total time spent getting take-out (1 hour, 18 minutes) vs. ordering for delivery (1 hour, 38 minutes) vs. Yummy Sandwich (33 minutes). They also annoyingly refer to the delivery "boy," a seemingly minor thing until…
New York City at night is a beautiful thing. I love walking the streets, breathing in cool, crisp air and not having to deal with the obstacle course of confused and starry-eyed tourists that clog the sidewalks during the day.
As dive bars go, few can match Rudy’s on Ninth Avenue up in Hell’s Kitchen. (I refuse to call it by its gentrified name, Clinton.) $8 pitchers, free hot dogs and one of the coolest jukeboxes in the city. Back-to-back Hall & Oates songs made my night! The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays was a pleasant discovery, too.
Once inside, you can forget that the Disneyfied, tourist-ridden streets of Times Square and the Theater District are only a couple of blocks away. The clientele has changed a bit over the years, getting younger and pseudo-hip, and I don’t remember the backyard being open – but with the Mets game on the TV over the bar, it’s still a perfect spot for drinking and jawboning with a best friend about to hit the road. (Yeah, I said “jawboning.”)
In between random talk of everything from life in the military to the beauty of Colorado to the awkwardness of dealing with “divorced” friends, we decided to scrap much of the formality for tomorrow night’s show and send him west with a healthy dose of irrereverance and a nod of recognition lacking from other quarters.
1. Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican is without question the best autobiography I've ever read. Her writing is vibrant, fluid, and concise. Her evocation of life in PR as Americanization slowly seeps in is deadeye brilliant, and her transition to life in the margins in Brooklyn is heart-rending. She never uses a hammer to make her points, choosing the subtle, the offhand, the seemingly innocuous instead. Edwidge Danticat should take notes. Ernesto Quinones should be embarrased. 2. What ever happened to Junot Diaz? 3. Up next, Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls. 4.…
It was a year ago, almost to the day, that I went to St. Mark's Comics with Omar and got hooked on comic books again. "Hooked" in that crackhead sense, apparently, as after buying a legit box for them, I've realized the sense of control I thought I had over what, and how much, I was buying turned out to be a severe case of denial. For some reason, I thought the long boxes held 100 comics and was surprised when my nascent collection didn't fill it completely. So I counted...and realized I've bought over 200 comics in the past…