Archive for 'The Offical Record' Category
SHOP THE BRONX’S LITTLE ITALY ONLINE.
1 September 2002The online store at the Arthur Avenue Web site let’s you shop for meat and cheese and bread and souvenirs and other items delivered anywhere in the country by next day air. If I didn’t live here in New York, I’d be all over that.
THE BRONX’S LITTLE ITALY.
1 September 2002Jin K. and I had dinner on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, after a New York Times Article last week compared the Bronx’s version of Little Italy favorably to Manhattan’s more famous one. We had a very nice, and surprisingly inexpensive meal, but I realize now that I should probably have tried to go during […]
WHAT IS REAL? (A POEM BY ME).
31 August 2002Hey, baby, what about you? What are the things that you wanna do? I’m drivin’. I’m driven. Scent drifts from my virgin lips. I need it. I bleed it. I believe it. Who are you tryin’ to fool, baby? What did you think this was all about? Did you think we could just walk away? […]
SEX IS OVERRATED.
30 August 2002Listen, I’ve got nothing against sex, and I’m sure I’m every bit as fond of it as the next guy. But, you know, it’s not the only thing in life. It doesn’t need to be the subject of every song and every poem and every novel and every movie and every TV Show and every […]
THE STORY OF THE MONTH (OR SO).
30 August 2002Well, it only took me–wait, this can’t be right–FIVE AND A HALF YEARS, but I’ve finally updated the Story of the Month (Or So) on my personal home page, www.creamy.com. This month (or so)’s story is “Mr. Jones, The School Teacher Mad with Power“. It is purely a coincidence, I assert for legal reasons, that […]
THE BEST BLOG YOU’RE NOT READING.
29 August 2002The advice that I try out the Friday Five came from Blake N., whose blog, “Blake Got Blogged” is my favorite blog to read. There are a lot of clever, creative blogs out there, but they just can’t compete with television and movies and books and magazines and professional Web pages for entertainment. But Blake’s […]
THE FRIDAY FIVE.
29 August 2002In keeping with the suggestion I received to answer more party-game type questions in my Blog, here’s “The Friday Five“. 1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not? I co-founded Charge.Com with my brother, and we run it together. […]
THIS OR THAT.
29 August 2002I’m told I should try including these party-game type questions in my Blog, so I’ll give it a try. Here’s somebody’s “This or that” list that maybe I’ll keep up with when I remember. The theme of the list is “TV nostalgia“. 1. Sesame Street or Captain Kangaroo? Sesame Street, but Captain Kangaroo was cool. […]
MICHAEL J. FOX’S AQUAFINA COMMERCIAL.
29 August 2002Isn’t that new Michael J. Fox commercial for Aquafina water kind of creepy? In it, he’s animated and he looks like he’s in his 20s, and it doesn’t actually look that much like him, which is presumably why they put his name on the screen. But the thing is, you know he has Parkinson’s, and […]
FEARDOTCOM.
28 August 2002The new movie “FearDotCom” has nothing to do with the Web site “fear.com“, which has gotten a pretty huge windfall in traffic lately, I should think. The website for the movie is feardotcom.com. That seems pretty stupid to me. It kind of makes me not want to see the movie. Or, rather, that is, it […]
WHAT DOES “SINGLE” MEAN?
27 August 2002About 3 or 4 years ago, I went out with Julia B.. We only went out twice. She lived about 3 hours north of New York, and I lived an hour and a half south, in Philadelphia, and we used to meet here in New York. I can’t remember when or why we stopped seeing […]
PROFANITY.
25 August 2002In writing that last post, I was made a little uncomfortable by having to type and publish profanity on my Web site. It’s not like I’ve never sworn before, including in print and on the Web and on stage. But I’ve really cut down on it, especially in public. What happened was, I used to […]
THEATER REVIEW: A NIGHT OF SHITTY THEATRE * * * 1/2 (3 and a half stars out of 4).
25 August 2002I just saw this show, part of the New York International Fringe Festival, with Danny B. and Graham M. The premise of the show is that the company takes actual plays that are really terrible, and act out scenes from these terrible scripts. The concept works brilliantly, and just never gets old. The opening scene, […]
TUNNEL OF LOVE.
24 August 2002The New York Sun reported Friday about a repidly spreading anonymous August 14 email that declares the front train of every New York City subway car to be the “singles car”, where singles can mingle and strike up a conversation with one another. I think that’s a pretty interesting idea. Anyway, I just wanted to […]
THEATER REVIEW: THE GRADUATE * * * (3 stars out of 4).
24 August 2002I saw the Graduate on Broadway last night with Danny B. and his brother Bernie. Briefly, in case you’ve never heard of or seen the movie, both the movie and the play are about a recent college graduate who has an affair with his parents’ friend, Mrs. Robinson, who has a daughter named Elaine. The […]
WHAT THESE STARS MEAN IN THE REVIEWS.
24 August 2002I thought it would be a good idea to set out what the different number of stars mean in my reviews, more for getting it straight in my own head than for any other reason. (no stars) — “The worst.” The worst of the worst. Absurdly bad. 1/2 (half a star) — “Terrible.” Practically no […]
BOOK REVIEW: EVERYTHING AND A KITE * * * (3 stars out of 4).
24 August 2002Everything and a Kite by Ray Ramano was really funny and made me laugh again and again. I listened to the book on tape (which is usually the case with these book reviews, by the way), and I particularly recommend that you get it on audio, because it’s read by Romano, and his delivery has […]
POTTED MEAT FOOD PRODUCT.
24 August 2002I was at the drug store to buy some Dr. Scholl’s insoles, and I saw a 3 ounce can of “Armour Potted Meat Food Product”. It has no other name or description. On the can is a picture of some bright pink mush on a cracker, too undefined to have been said to have been […]
MOVIE REVIEW: RONIN * * 1/2 (2 and a half stars out of 4).
24 August 2002My friend Stefanie C. said she really loved this movie. But when I rented it, my brother and both my parents each told me that they thought it was the worst movie they ever saw. So, I was really looking forward to seeing it and, for good or bad, having a strong reaction to it. […]
LATIN FESTIVAL.
24 August 2002My friend P. is now a prominent local politician in South Florida. He invited me to join him and his wife at a local Latin Festival. There were over a hundred thousand people there, I heard tell, which is a lot of people for South Florida. Even though the streets are very broad, it was […]
THEATER REVIEW: THE SUN RISES IN THE EAST * 1/2 (1 and a half stars out of 4).
24 August 2002I just saw The Sun Rises in the East tonight with Jin K. as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. This one man show was disappointing, and not very good. It opened with an okay piece, where the performer pretended to be the teacher in a community school class on cultural relativism. But […]
I’M BACK IN NEW YORK.
24 August 2002I’m back in New York. I know I haven’t been keeping up with my blog too well lately. I make no excuse, and I make no apology.
MOVIE REVIEW: LITTLE NICKY 1/2 (half a star out of 4).
18 August 2002Ugh. I suppose it’s possible that someone will make a worse movie someday, so I gave it that half-star instead of none. And I guess I sort of chuckled once or twice. But in the first five minutes, I could see that this movie was no good, and I should have just bailed out then […]
BOOK REVIEW: OGILVY ON ADVERTISING * * * 1/2 (3 and a half stars out of 4).
17 August 2002“Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy is fascinating, whether you buy advertising (as I do) or merely find yourself occasionally exposed to it. The bulk of the book is taken up by detailing what specific techniques work the best, mainly for print advertising. He sites research showing which kinds of fonts work best, and where […]
“NO EXCESSIVE STARING.”
17 August 2002At the Oasis, at the Sawgrass Mills mall in Sunrise, Florida, there’s a sign posted of the rules for people who are hanging out there. They have the usual stuff about not swearing and not painting graffiti, and not panhandling. But early on, they have this rule against “excessive staring.” Weird.