3.01.2013

Lost In Time, Lost In Brooklyn

Not really a big deal. I always get lost when I go to Brooklyn. This time I had a map (thank you Google maps ) so it only took turning down a few wrong blocks before I was headed in the right direction:

The MTA Transit Museum.

If I remember this correctly, this train is from the 40s

You have to go down into an old subway station, and if you are not paying attention, you could miss the entrance. (as I did, standing right next to it.) It starts with the history (the breaking ground and the sand hogs), and continues up to the present (hybrid busses). There are old photos and stories and old signage, and when you go down one more flight: Old trains!

You can see my friends in the window.



As you can see, the trains had the old advertising in them as well.


The place was full of people, many New Yorkers, and it seems to me that, despite the amount we all complain about it, we New Yorkers love our mass transit!

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2.24.2013

Tibetan Throat Singers and Patti Smith: a Love Story

It started with Tibetan monks singing a prayer. It ended with Patti Smith and her Band.

It was the Tibet House US Benefit at Carnegie Hall. 

So this is where my brain went when the monks started singing: Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory, torturing his roommate by practicing his Tuvan Throat Singing.


Then, to completely change the mood, tUnE yArD comes on and plays a Yoko Ono song called Warrior Woman.

Warrior Woman clip from Artist Direct. Just thirty seconds but it gives you a taste.

The whole show was very avant garde, so it was more than appropriate to open with a Yoko Ono tune. I won't give you a blow-by-blow of the whole concert, because it was 3 hours long, but there was a string quartet, electronic and midi music, a human beat box, Phillip Glass, poetry, dance, and my personal favorite: Patti Smith Band playing For Your Love with the Tibetan Monks. No, I have no video of that. Mea culpa.

Patti Smith recited an Allan Ginsburg poem, Wichita Vortex Sutra, accompanied by Phillip Glass. It occurred to me about half way through the poem that I've never actually read any Ginsburg; I've only had it read to me. Then she wrapped the whole evening up with three of her songs, ending with The People Have the Power.

The audience in Carnegie Hall were on their feet.

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2.19.2013

We mess up everything at R.H. Macy's

My goddaughter and I visited Macy's on President's Day to hunt for shoes. She is having a Sweet Sixteen party — something I never had nor attended in my youth, but there we were, and she needed shoes. The department apparently has been redone, and is now the largest shoe department . . . anywhere? I think they said anywhere. There are something like 300,000 shoes at the Macy's in Herald Square, and we were there to look at them all.

We started on one end, walked briefly through Louis Vitton, but exited quickly. Yes, we got scared away. The first shoes that really caught our eye were in the Michael Kors section. Beautiful, and so much less intimidating.  A man named Edward greeted us there, and when we told him we had just started to look, he told us that he'd give us the "Sandy Relief" discount because we were from New York. Now, I already had a visitor's discount card because I used my Connecticut license, but that was only 10% and the Sandy one was going to be 20%. But he said, "You can only get it if you come to me. So whatever you see in the store, bring it here."

We looked in every section, took pictures, then decided over lunch which ones she would try on.

The red-glitter Dorothy shoes I had to talk her out of buying.
Only because the heel was too freaking high.

What you see here are Burberry shoes. At over $500, a pipe dream.


Well, we almost immediately screwed up the Edward thing. To be fair to ourselves, we had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea how it worked to bring shoes from another section to a salesperson elsewhere. Remember, this place was HUGE. We decided my goddaughter would try on shoes in other sections and when we found something we liked we'd bring it to Edward to ring up.

And the first screw up was in Michael Kors itself. We got there and there was no Edward. So we had this other guy bring out shoes for us. (and what was the first thing he said, which we ignored? "Was anyone helping you?")

Then, across the floor at Nina shoes, we got yelled at.

We had a woman helping us there, and we mentioned that we had shoes on hold at Michael Kors. Then this scary colleague of hers came over and told us we could only have ONE person in Macy's helping us. ONE. What were we doing, having different salespeople in the shoe department helping us?

ONE.

Now we knew we had screwed up, so we gathered a few more shoes to try on and high-tailed it back to Edward.

He was very very disappointed in us. He had to tell the other Michael Kors guy that HE was actually helping us from the get-go, and then he reiterated to us about his being able to give us the secret discount.

And when we got our discount? It was the 10% visitor's, the one we would have gotten anyway! No, we said nothing about the Sandy discount, just got the heck it out of there with our shoes before we were yelled at again.

 The silver ones were the pair we bought.

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2.18.2013

Happy 80th Birthday, Yoko Ono

Say what you will about Yoko, there's something great about this song she wrote right after Lennon was murdered:

Yoko Ono: "Nobody Sees Me Like You Do" (1981)

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2.15.2013

Love L-U-V

"You best believe I'm in love L-U-V. . . ." RIP Shadow Morton, producer for the Shangri Las.

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2.14.2013

Early Bird Catches the. . . Ew

Another first in a long time: I'm early for work. Turns out it was easy -- just don't hit the snooze alarm. Meanwhile I have a visiting cat in my house, which is making my two resident females a little twitchy. Hopefully we'll make it the two weeks with no bloodshed. Side note: did you know that in "literary" circles. the use of "hopefully" is frowned upon? People use it to mean "I hope" but technically it means "full of hope," as in, "Full of hope, we'll make it the two weeks." I think the literary circles should chill out and accept the fact that "Hopefully", the way most people use it, is here to stay. Pictures of visiting cat to be posted soon.

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2.13.2013

I'm Baaa-aaack. . . .

It's been a while. Okay, truth is, when I tried to use a fancier template for this blog, everything got all messed up. Then, I spent a few years writing a novel. So here I am again, and hopefully will be entertaining you all (or should I say, both of you) once more. Coming up:posts about the Phillip Glass and Friends concert next week at Carnegie Hall, a review of Wicked, and ... well, the usual thoughts about New York City and whatever pop culture is currently amusing me. Just a thought: are blogs passé now that we have Twitter? Yes, that's how long it has been since I've posted here. By the way, I'm @onecheer on Twitter. See you all on the flip.

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