Hi! Sorry for the delay in getting Issue 3 out, I got distracted preparing for and then hosting my mom (hi, mom). Things we enjoyed which perhaps you will, too:
Stuffed sopaipillas at Ursula in Crown Heights
âMarking Time: Art In The Age Of Mass Incarcerationâ at MoMA PS1
Timed tickets for museums in general⊠you guys, I love NYC with covid crowd control, itâs so nice. Anyone who says âNew York is overâ can 100% leave â the fewer people the better imo heheh
Floristeria Rosa De Guadalupe, a skinny storefront with flowers and plants near Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick
Anyway, this weekâs contributor is David Turner. Itâs weird to qualify your friend to others, but I guess David is a music writer â I mean, I donât guess, he IS, I promise. You can read his words in Pitchfork, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Slate, Spin, etc. He also writes the newsletter Penny Fractions, about the insidious industry of digital music and streaming. Additionally, David is the author of some of my favorite text messages, usually about what zoomers are wearing and other cultural harbingers.
One nice thing we do in our friendship is pick a neighborhood or district to survey and take a jaunt around to inspect The Culture. Recently we went to Soho to observe the shopping center post-protests, see how many storefronts permanently closed, what the kids are wearing, what is for sale at the Noah store, etc. People are definitely out n about shopping it up. It looked like some international tourists but didnât notice too many American tourists. Lots of outfit photos being taken. Line out the door at the Gucci store. All of the t-shirts individually sealed in clear dry cleaning bags at the Supreme store. Outdoor diners sipping Aperol spritz at all price points. Besides the masks and slightly thinner crowds, really felt like business as usual in Soho. Nature is healing :)
Walking up to the East Village and then Alphabet City was more fruitful. Highlight was a band set up in Tompkins Square Park playing to an audience of all stripes, but mostly what we assume were NYU freshman. When the band covered a 2001 Strokes song, the kids went wild, moshing in their vintage clothes, which ranged from â70s prairie to â80s punk to â90s grunge and â00s excess. The cynic in me rolls her eyes at all the recycling of dress and music and behavior, but the softer side found it very sweet. These kids, 18 or 19 or 20, new to New York, new to adulthood and independence, performing jubilance in the park, energized by the moment, a real âNew York moment,â trying hard to not try hard, to dance like no oneâs watching, but of course dozens of people were watching. It was nice. It was lively. The zoomers in Tompkins looked like they were having a lot more fun than the millennials taking outfit pix in Soho. We can unpack all that another day â on to Davidâs picks!
AceMoMa, Kush Jones & DJ SWISHA B2B @ The Lot Radio 09 - 10 - 2020
âEarlier this year, before the pandemic and before the massive global protests for black lives I was gonna make a new commitment: Seeing music. It's not like I don't go to shows but as a person whose worked my entire professional career within the music industry I wanted to make a recommitment to live music. However, a foolish mistake I made was to skip seeing AceMo and MoMa Ready, because I incorrectly thought âthey're local I can see them whenever.â Jokes on me! So, because of that I've been even more devouring all of their excellent mixes of contemporary NYC dance music. Still dreaming of a future dancefloor.â
Slow + Reverb Videos
âMy hunch is that Slow + Reverb speak to a lingering youthful anxiety of growing up post-financial crash and now trapped again in another moment of economic collapse. And the slowed up melancholy of these songs is just a neat way of trying to understand such fucked up weird times. Or well that's my read and here are a few remixes that go very hard: âGypsy Woman,â âBoredom,â and âOn the Sea.ââ Â
Half-Moon Pose
âHuge fan of yoga here so I'll just say I've grown to love half-moon and other balancing poses during quarantine. Doesn't mean I'm good at them but it's a nice thing to practice and think about something that feels so far removed from everything going on in the world but is / can be deeply important to me. So, grabs some blocks, or books, and give it a try!â
Hanes Men's FreshIQÂź X-TempÂź Active CoolÂź Crew Socks 12-PackÂ
âDo these socks get holes after a while? Yes. Are they nice? Not really. Am I gonna buy some more, cause they're much warmer than most Uniqlo socks I bought in the early 2010s? Absolutely.â
Brooklyn Botanical GardenÂ
âNow, I'm not saying you need to go to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, cause there are plenty of garden or slices of nature that one could visit. However as a normally ânot a big nature personâ I gotta admit that ummm nature is good and I was a dumbass for dismissing it. So, yeah go find some nature or some big beautiful garden where you live.â
Russian Doll Season 1Â
âI'm not a TV watcher. Thus whenever I do watch a TV show I typically cannot shut-up about it for weeks. Now Russian Doll def features a lotta of the annoying dialogue that seems to befall any streaming show based in NYC BUT that becomes less pronounced the further the season develops. I loved the unexplained mystery of the entire season and felt such joy at the end. Wasn't expecting to connect so much with the show towards the end but I guess that's an upside of watching TV?!â
Thatâs a wrap for Issue 3! Thanks for reading. Be sure to check out Penny Fractions and share S.O.M.E. Newsletter with anyone who may enjoy :-)