What a Weekend

November 1, 2009
The past 3 days have been jam packed with goodness. There was a flood of Taylors into the city for the action, which began with The Brooklyn Museum show (see below) on Thursday night. Friday was my show at Monkeytown, which was a great experiment in the unique venue and hopefully the first of more evenings there. Saturday was Halloween, which has to be my favorite holiday for the fun and zaniness that defines the night. While I used to love it because of the booty stash I collected and hoarded for months, I now just love a good reason…

Who Shot Rock n Roll

October 30, 2009
When my mother-in-law said two years ago that she was going to write a book about rock n roll photography I was skeptical; while her knowledge of photography is about as deep as anyone in the world, her familiarity with the subject matter was pretty thin. Last night, all doubts were erased as I attended the opening of her exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum. She has pulled together 175 incredible photos from all aspects and generations of rock n roll and presented them beautifully, with text that demonstrates her complete understanding of rock's cultural power. It is inspiring to see…

The Wire

October 25, 2009
I'm a simple man who likes simple things, but life is infinitely complex. And then there's The Wire. It is simply the most intricately detailed and beautifully crafted story I've ever watched. Good guys and bad guys blend into moral ambiguity, while one man's solution is another man's problem. I fundamentally believe that killing anybody is bad, but there were characters and situations that made me question that belief. Some people do what they consider the right thing for the right reasons and still end up making everything worse. The law is constantly being reinterpreted and bent to fit the…

Good in the Hood

October 23, 2009
Tonight was a surprise explosion all over 5th ave. First I found myself bicycling home from work and every 2 blocks there was a musician/band performing on the corner, a beautiful action coordinated by local musicians. I was reminded of Firenze, Italia, where I lived for 3 months in 1999 and was always amazed at the variety of music and art produced in the streets. Not that New York doesn't have it's fair share of incredible buskers, but in Florence (and most of Italy, for that matter) the art was more public. It was a corridor of musical bliss... And…

Where The Wild Things Are

October 20, 2009
When someone showed me the trailer this summer, I freaked out. Obviously, this book was one of my favorites as a young tyke and to see it brought to the big screen by two of my favorite artists working today, Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, made me giddy like a nine-year old on pixy stix. The film captures the images from the book as well as I could hope, and manages to convey all the conflicting emotions perfectly. It brings me back to a time in my life when everything was hyper-important and my feelings controlled me more than I…

DMV: A Visit To My Own Personal Darkness

October 16, 2009
I am embedded in the Brooklyn DMV right now and moments ago was as close to corporal combustion as I have ever been. My mission is to register a car for Alaina and I and I was also here two days ago with the same goal and was rejected for lacking her signature on one document. It was unclear that her signature was required since there was only space for one signature, but it was a mistake I can live with, costing me only a wasted hour. Intrepidly, I pushed through my frustration and got her signature this morning before…

Bruce!

October 8, 2009
Giants Stadium was transformed tonight from sports arena into church as Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band took the wrecking ball to the stadium and brought down the house in one of the final concerts to be played there. He opened with a song dedicated to the stadium and its history, then played through four decades of his own musical contributions. He is playing five shows at The Meadowlands and each one features a different album; tonight was "Born To Run", which definitely has a seat among the greatest rock albums of all-time. His music is gloriously uplifting and…

Gowanus Canal Canoe + Underwater New York

October 3, 2009
The Gowanus is pretty nasty. It is an industrial waterway through Brooklyn that collects some extremely grimy artifacts from the city and brings them to the bottom, or in the case of condoms (Gowanus Ghost Fish), float them to the top. It has been designated as a Superfund EPA site, and according to their website: As a result of years of discharges, storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants the Gowanus Canal has become one of the nation's most extensively contaminated water bodies. Contaminants impacting the canal include PCBs, coal tar wastes, heavy metals and volatile organics. The contamination…

Health Insurance for Earth

October 2, 2009
Right now in Bangkok, a monumental conference is underway, involving delegates from all over the world who have come to discuss nothing less than the future survival of our planet. Climate change is the focus and negotiations have begun on the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol which will be drafted in Copenhagen next month. It is a crucial moment in our planet's history because we have already pushed the limits of our ecosystem's capacity to maintain itself and are bringing it to the brink of being inhospitable. There is no question that without checking our consumption and abuse, the atmosphere…