Since October 2008, I’ve received an average of one email every two tothree days from Barack and/or Michelle Obama. That’s about 35 emails that I have no use for. All of them have the word “Change” in them. 99 percent also have a link beginning with the word “Donate.”
This has to fucking stop.
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Hot smoothies at Surf City Squeeze on St. Mark's Place: Wintertime comfort or failed contrivance? OK OK. I guess if you remember our recent East Village retrospective, the very question might seem a painful emasculation of what the area once was. But if our story should have taught you anything, it's that people will always enjoy the East Village better if they pretend it was only just invented. With this in mind, I approach the counter and order a cran-pineapple-raspberry smoothie—magma-style, please.
"How are you going to heat it?" I ask the Asian barista with choppy black bangs and choppy English. She pours my blend into a pitcher. "I just put it in the microwave," she answers, speaking in the future tense. As I wait I wonder, Why doesn't everyone do this? It'll be like liquid cobbler. But I start to realize why not as the minutes pile up. She takes the pitcher out of the microwave, but she can't pour my drink into a cup or it'll melt the plastic. I pace and pace. "Too hot," she says. After almost 20 minutes, she sets my smoothie cup down on the counter. I note the viscosity of the sloshing liquid and realize that smoothies are so called because they're thick with crushed ice. This is just rather heavy juice.
Anyhow, I pay my five bucks, take my concoction out onto the street and begin to drink. Mmm! Hot pie down my gullet in the cold cold night! My belly burns with sweet purple fruit! I take a break from sipping, and then I learn the second problem with hot smoothies: They lose heat fast in this weather, quickly becoming lukewarm smoothies. If you don't drink it soon enough, it's like you're cleaning your apartment the morning after a smoothie party; so many ingrate guests didn't finish their drinks, left them sitting around on countertops or windowsills. For some reason, you take a sip from one and ugh! Why did you do it?
Feeling a little rotund after the festive season?
Well there’s no better way to lose weight post-New Year’s than have some of your e-buddies help scrub that chub.
The thing is, Williamsburg's cool kids plump up too, so they have to figure out ways to get motivated: e-semble style. How about weekly weight posting? Yeah, that’ll do it! That’s the thinking at least according to a few of the big’uns nattering over on Williamsboard's "Williamsboard's Biggest Loser" thread.
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It was 14 years ago today that toothsome figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was kneecapped by Jeff Gillooly, rival skater Tonya Harding's creepy ex-husband. Some people remember it as a day that changed the sport of figure skating forever. Others remember it as the day that saying "Why Me?" took on a whole new meaning that is still funny to them but occasionally confuses their friends and needs to be explained which sort of makes them look like a bad person. Oh well.
In honor of the sad, historic occasion, here is a video of some legal ass whooping that Harding doled out. This time ex-Bill Clinton flame Paula Jones is on the receiving end.
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Robert Mugabe, the internationally despised despot of Zimbabwe, is going on vacation to Malaysia for a month.
Never mind the widespread outbreaks of cholera, the trillion-percent-and-growing inflation, or the total breakdown of basic social services and infrastructure: Bobby needs some sun and a banana daiquiri please!
We love chutzpah here at New York Press, and it would be a dream to know if there’s a way to say it in Shona, the language of Mugabe’s traditional ethnicity. So far we have ufuza, “imbecility,” chisimba, “impudence” and munhu akaipa, or a morally bad person. There’s also tsvuuramuromo or one who annoys or causes an angry reaction, usually intentionally.
However, this online Shona dictionary doesn’t go past “M” in English so we’re pretty limited. Submissions welcome!
It was only last night, sitting at the recently-cleaned-up-and-now-more-expensive Mama's Bar on Avenue B, that a friend and I bemoaned the state of East Village bars. For the most part it seems like divey spots to enjoy a shot and a beer have gone belly up, and it won't be long before a super-secret speakeasy opens underneath the Rite Aid on Avenue D. There are places, though, that you can always count on. And I thought Holiday Cocktail Lounge was one of them. Hell, just a few weeks back, Josh Bernstein revisited the classic dive and came away just as impressed (and drunk) as ever. But according to reports I'm reading, with owner Stefan Lutak in the hospital, the future of the bar is uncertain.
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There's something charming about that Times story on bees being dosed with cocaine. Perhaps it's that it brings us back to Friday nights at Lit, where everyone was twice as likely to dance and circled about 25 percent faster. Or maybe it's that the bees end up searching for food instead of just sitting around a table at Odessa watching that one weird girl eat blintzes while everyone else nursed vodka tonics.
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In the interest of authenticity, the creative team behind the upcoming Broadway revival of Blithe Spirit posted a craigslist ad asking for real mediums in an effort to “guarantee that each performance is every bit as genuine as possible.” Their audition will consist of two minutes in which to “conjure the spirit of Noel Coward or to display any psychic abilities.”
In the Noel Coward play, Madame Arcati (to be played by theater legend Angela Lansbury) brings back the ghost of Elvira (Christine Ebersole), the dead first wife of novelist Charles Condomine (Rupert Everett)—which means the lucky medium will get the chance to work with La Lansbury herself. Let's just hope that those mediums don't actually conjure the spirit of Noel Coward. If he doesn't like what he sees on the stage, no doubt he won't be shy about expressing himself. He was, after all, the man who once famously told a stubborn Claudette Colbert that if he could find her neck, he'd wring it.
[Blithe Spirit on Broadway Seeking Mediums]
It might not be the Jew, the Italian and the Redhead Gay, but humor could be coming back to Avenue A. The blogs are buzzing today that the the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, the much ballyhooed and usually funny West Side chuckle hut, is eying the former Two Boots Pioneer Theater on East 3rd Street that Matt Harvey recently wrote about.
We're all for it; Alphabet City could use some folks who are intentionally ridiculous.
