From the hotel parking lot
Overlooking Il Golfo dei Poeti, the Gulf of Poets, so called because so many poor poets were thrown in here as punishment for being nerds.
JK! I haven’t looked it up yet, but hopefully that is not the actual origin of the name.
Ciao!
Arthur and I are bound for Europe tomorrow, to enjoy two and a half weeks of burning hot Mediterranean sun; explaining our vegetarianism in broken Italian, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian; and attending the weddings of two lovely and sophisticated women we do not know well.
I’ve been nose to the grindstone for the past few weeks preparing to basically shut down my freelance biz for the better part of August. Woo! I also tasked myself with the related duty of finishing my last journal and buying a new one to start on the trip. Last Friday, I done did it!
Goodbye, old friend; hello, new… friend
I always feel way too smugly satisfied when I retire a finished journal (do you know how much genius is in there??), but then I’m always proportionately humbled when I realize how daunted I feel when faced with all those brand-new, blank pages.
I guess parts of Europe are at least marginally inspiring. So here’s to jump-starting the new spiral guy with quotes overheard at smoky outdoor cafes, stories about making out in the shadows of really old churches, and old-school overnight train tickets pressed between the pages.
A couple of months ago, I got an invite from a friend-of-a-friend who was interested in forming a new North Brooklyn chapter of the business networking organization BNI. I had heard of BNI, but had (quite luckily and happily) always been too busy working to check it out.
However, this personal invitation grabbed me. I’d be founding a new group (fun professional development activity), with this friend-of-a-friend who I totally hit it off with (fun social activity), and would almost certainly gain some new business connections (fun $$$).
The photo of our founding members I’m sending out with all my email invites. Who wouldn’t want to join us?!
But it turns out it’s a pretty long and involved process to get a group started, and as we go through the paces, I admit I’m experiencing bouts of cold feet.
Here’s a plusses and minuses rundown—maybe you can help me decide if I should continue?
Pros:
Cons:
So, dear readers, what do you think? Have you heard of BNI? What’s your impression? Had any experiences with it yourself? If you were me, what would you do?
My dear friend and longtime client Elena is leaving NYC on a pre-dawn flight to Mexico tomorrow to embark on the 10-day silent meditation retreat that will usher in a bold new “oh-my-god-what-is-happening??” chapter of her life. I would say congratulations and good luck, but I don’t want to trip up her whole not-speaking thing.
Since we met a decade ago, I’ve known Elena by turns as a diligent, fair-minded, and hardworking coworker, partner in shenanigans, and small business proprietor. She thinks about almost everything deeply. She makes sumptuous vegetarian meals on the fly. Over the years, she’s handed down a grip of her classy clothing to me, which I hope made beautiful space in her closet with the same proportions as it filled the ghastly gaps in mine.
Recently, Elena decided to take an indefinite break from her glamorous Upper West Side life: she parked her baby blue Piaggio scooter in storage, sold most of her other belongings, and put her successful nutrition coaching practice on hiatus. Tomorrow, she’ll touch down in Mexico, and after that, it’s off to work on a veganic farm in the southwest. After that? I’m pretty sure she’d say your guess is as good as hers.
The fact that I realized today that I should probably retire Elena’s testimonial from my website (for now) is the least important part of this story, but it did make me want to tell it, so that’s cool.
Godspeed, Elena! You’ve got chutzpah, and I love ya. Just remember: Wild Women Don’t Sing the Blues.
Last week, I had the super-pleasure of attending the Urban Green Council‘s fourth annual EBie Awards (pronounced EE-bee!). These “Oscars of Existing Buildings” recognize improved environmental performance: measures that reduce energy consumption, efficiently use storm water runoff, improve indoor environmental quality to promote better human health, etc.
Please proceed to GOOD TIMES
I was there as a guest of the terrific designer (and my good friend) Claire Hansen and her equally inimitable husband Russell Unger, executive director of Urban Green, so the conversation over dinner was guaranteed to be good. But, to my delight, the merriment didn’t stop there.
The evening combined all the great things about classic awards shows—Broadway numbers, presenters ribbing presenters, and an open bar—with not-so-common actual importance: these people were being celebrated for saving millions of kilowatts of electricity, saving even more millions of gallons of water, and educating building owners, tenants, and visitors about their life-saving best practices. I’ll raise a Super Sap cube to that!
I covered the EBies for Urban Green’s blog, and I’m happy to report their communications crew was just as nice and fun to work with as I’d imagined. They organize and host great events all the time; I hope to hang out at and write about many more of them!
Thanks to my friend Naama Shefi, Director of Communications at EatWith, my man and I enjoyed a lovely Sunday brunch today at the Lower East Side’s historic Essex Market.
“Eat dinner with fellow food lovers at the home of a chef in your city or when you travel,” says EatWith’s website. Friendly, hungry people can browse shared dining experiences going on in over 150 cities, or book an EatWith chef for a private event.
I’m a huge fan of all the sharing enterprises that have rushed the market, tsunami-like, in the past few years. Pioneers like Craigslist, and now sites like Airbnb and NeighborGoods, have removed the middleman from the equation and allow people to share and sell their own stuff directly with other individuals. In these affairs, the personal reputation you earn makes or breaks your interactions, which seems like a pretty fair way to go about business to me.
A somewhat less Libertarian-y reason I enjoy these kinds of doings is that they’re a great way to meet fun people who also like to get out into the world. This morning, we sat near a Caribbean pediatrician, a young investment banker, and a native Texan who now writes movie reviews for The Hollywood Reporter. Not a bad haul!
Oh yes, and the food was also wonderful. Emily and Anais made tiny beer mustard deviled eggs, an asparagus bruschetta on olive bread, and a grilled pineapple sandwich on a sticky cinnamon roll, as well as other treats—all as good as they sound. The cucumber gin basil fizzy totally sealed the deal.
So get thee to EatWith, I say! It’s a fun and fresh method for getting one of your three squares in while brushing up on your conversation skills, and maybe even acquainting yourself with a new culinary idea or two. For example, I will now be making all my sandwiches on sticky cinnamon rolls.
I chanced to peep a sign reading Essence of Self across the street from the Ringwood, New Jersey Park-n-Ride this past weekend, on my way to my first solo writing retreat. My first thought was “Awesome name!” My second was, “Hey, maybe it’s also significant…”
I decided to go on a weekend writing retreat by myself because: a) I’ve heard from many other writers that they’re super beneficial, b) I wanted to earmark some time to work specifically on the personal writing endeavors I’d lately been neglecting (namely my journal and a story about a guy I met who hands out these funny business cards), and c) I’m smitten with the idea of one day embarking on a longer-term silent meditation retreat, but know I don’t have the cojones yet. Baby steps!
What I found following my sunny 36-ish hours at the pretty amazing Castle at Skylands Manor (yes! I stayed in a Castle!! somehow, it wasn’t expensive) was:
All in all, time well spent. Now, back to the incessant ice cream truck jingles and sooty windowsills of my home in Williamsburg!
Fellow scribes (or anyone): Have you gone on a solo creative-type retreat somewhere? What was it like?
So says I! (And I didn’t even know about The Shins song until I wrote that and Googled it to see if it’s a thing.)
I recently wrote a blog post for my client and badass crowd-resourcing platform ioby that starts on this positive note. Call me a Pollyanna, but I just reread it on their website and was cheered to find I still believe it’s true.
I found this on Flickr when I searched for “grassroots” (Posted by Anonymous9000: “Brilliant handmade Rorschach mask with the scientology Cult’s Oak Cove building in the background”)
When our parents were our age, how did they raise money to build a new community garden, get a mural painted on an underpass wall, or start an after-school reading program? I’m sure, heroically, they organized bake sales, passed the hat at church, and put up fliers on lampposts.
All of that stuff is great (especially the bake sales), but today’s neighborhood leaders also have The Mighty Internet at their disposal, and the difference is night and day. Case in point: since its founding in 2009, ioby has helped 450 local improvement projects get off the ground with almost $1.5 million in crowdfunded cash.
This ain’t your mama’s Rice Krispies Treat (though, again, I love those, too)! Let’s hear it for the Internet and awesome orgs like ioby. Being a grassroots guy may never have been sweeter.
By asking me to speak!
Oh, I joke. I’m really hoping to not embarrass my friend and fellow writer Tracy Sayre at her next awesome Writers Work conference, coming up on Saturday, June 27 in Manhattan.
Her excellent conferences provide newb and experienced writers alike with opportunities to network, hear useful advice from interesting speakers, and sometimes even take a few minutes to write on the fly and share what happens.
I’m super touched that Tracy asked me to hold court on the topic “How to Pay the Rent with Your Writing”—something I suppose I have been managing to do for a while! Now, I just have to think of what to say…
There are still a handful of tickets left as I type this. Git yer hands on ’em now and I’ll see you there!
“…in the same way he helped to reinvent western culture in his own time.”
Right on!
Thus spake my friend Lily Wen: DJ, Lindy Hop champion, and now record label entrepreneur, regarding the late great Alan Watts.
The old codger himself (image via Ingienous Designs)
I feel like I’ve always been vaguely aware of this British philosopher-hippie who helped bring Eastern provocations to the West, but I felt a spike of connection with his work last week, at the pre-release party for the vinyl EP Face the Facts, out today on Lily’s Figure & Ground label.
The record takes the occasion of what would have been Watts’ 100th birthday to present four “spoken word” tracks taken from hundreds of hours of his seminar recordings, set to music by New York woodwind musician Jas Walton.
Figure & Ground’s website describes the original material as “psychedelic Californian ruminations, intriguing incantations, and compelling thoughts on existence.” When I heard some of them at the party (held at the wonderful and cozy Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books in the West Village), I did feel as though I were sitting in Watts’ houseboat living room, awash in mind-stretching inducements to alternate ways of viewing the world.
It was very cool.
Lily’s gotten some great press for her efforts, including write-ups in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wax Poetics, and Elephant (which I suggested she pitch to—yay!).
The record goes on sale in stores worldwide starting today, via Fat Beats distribution. If you’d prefer to stay in the living room, you can order a copy in digital or vinyl format from the Figure & Ground website instead.
Cheers, Lily! And cheers, Mr. Watts.
April Greene 