loquacious.

February 14, 2015 / mscharlies / Leave a comment

Today’s luscious WordBowl word comes to us from Lydia (thanks, Lydia!) of Urban Sound Review

“…so we’re all up in it, mad drum’n’bass, excellent tracks I picked up in the UK — what a trip, Raindance, Genisus88, the beatmasters who ignited this thing, you gotta get your ass over there — I’m scratching in some funk, and we roll the video, projected wall-to-wall, blown-up and out, slow-mo, I’m deepening the groove, heavy sub-bass, and no one recognized it, even though it was on CNN like non-stop for a while, such sick shit — literally sick, everywhere — George W. Bush yakking into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, and the faces, the horror on all those faces surrounding him,”

Bloody Mary schlurp, bits of horseradish clinging to the stubble above his lip.

“Jerked” Margaritas?

“Oh man, I can practically feel the vitamins coursing through my veins! Whatever that sparkly girl, the one with the butterfly wings, handed out was cut to shit with speed,”

Thumbs drumming scarred bar.

“You were already out of there, right? Damn! Check it: when the camera zoomed in on Bush’s face, we paused, and I sampled the “turn around, bright eyes” snippet from that Bonnie Tyler song, it was transcendent — seriously! — the humanity in those eyes, they melted the screen. Our president, the leader of the free-fucking-world, but in that moment a man, a human felled by microbes or parasites or some shit, all his political power meaningless. He who gave us Desert Storm, our first fucking televised war, captured on video bowing — literally, doubled over — obsequious to a higher power, to the body, or nature, primal forces the existence of which is unacknowledged until we are felled by their effects.”

Calloused thumb flicking lighter to flame, flicking to flame, flicking to flame.

“Like this Rodney King shit. unacknowledged undercurrents, fears and resentments gurgling underneath this construct we call civil society, and I’m not talking just about anger, righteous anger. I’m talking about hope.”

Plucking ice cubes from his glass, dilated pupils dancing, still raving.

Not your everyday cuppa

“Don’t look at me like that it was hope, is hope! Hope for a future without artificial barriers between races, man-made class structures, peoples housed in specific geographic zones within our city, like Indian reservations, all the same bullshit, inflicted by those who seized power, declared war, claimed victory. So even as shit-crazed as these past weeks have been, as Los Angeles burned, so did something else, and at some point we rubbed the ashes from our eyes, looked at each other and really saw each other, as people, because once rage burns away, we are left with is hope. And love! Yes, I said love!”

Tugging frayed jacket, exposing fresh t-shirt, rainbow graphic L-O-V-E beaming bright.

Miss Lily’s ONE LOVE BELLINI

“Someone was selling these last night, LOVE a sellout, we wore our love like tribal colors, a love tribe! It’s 1992, we are dancing toward a new millennium, we are shaking off the shackles of a corrupted past, rocketing past corroded ways of thinking — designations based on race or gender or nationality, music ticking to a specific meter, sexuality codified within specific confines — we are all human, we are a world race, we are melding into one glorious, orgasmic species, Our Brave New World an extended middle finger to Huxley and Orwell because we survived the Apocalypse, we are post-apocalypse, post-race, post-gender, there is no turning back, we incinerated those bridges, we are beyond just getting along, we will be worthy of our hope, worthy of love.”

Out of loyalty to the dearly departed 7A (although in truth I had not been in for a 3am patty melt in years), I initially eschewed Miss Lily’s Avenue A but on a bitter winter weekend afternoon their World-Music-by-way-of-Ibiza vibe proved irresistible.

And if you have yet to experience Everyman Espresso, drop whatever you are doing and head deep into Soho for — depending on your mood — one of the most thrilling or satisfying cups of caffeinated deliciousness in town.

Coffee for everyman…

What’s YOUR word?

narcissism.

September 28, 2014 / mscharlies / 2 Comments

Want to play WordBowl? Click HERE.

Our word today courtesy of the provocative writer who ponders questions seemingly small, deceptively deep on Ugly LIttle Things.

Bitter, spicy, boozy PIGALLE cocktail at Dirty French

Rite of Spring, the front page newspaper article and accompanying photographs revisiting our father’s major league exploits, praise heaped upon him for volunteering, once again, to coach Little League. In that small Southern hamlet, he was something approaching celebrity.

One year, a reporter described our father as having a demeanor that makes Pat Boone look aggressive, which was so far off the mark it set my siblings and I to snorting. The gullibility of the so-called journalist. First seeds of media distrust sewn deep.

Rite of Spring, my brothers clamoring for baseball anecdotes, tales of legendary teammates frayed from the telling, pivotal plays, dugout gossip. The only child who traveled with the team, I alone lived on the fringes of these stories, had future Hall of Fame inductees — Gaylord Perry, Willie Mays — and their wives as babysitters.

My siblings had me as their babysitter. Rampant resentments on all sides.

Vita view

The discrepancy between the perception of our father and the reality went beyond amusement, but we were raised with the tacit understanding certain behaviors were part and parcel with the talents bestowed upon him, the exacting discipline he cultivated to achieve the dream of so many American boys, the pressure of public scrutiny.

Our father came of age between the triumphant wake of WWII and the disillusionments of Korea, Vietnam. Sports cast as a national narrative, the American Dream writ large in crowded stadiums wild with hope, or backyards crackling with tinny radios and charred hotdogs, or living rooms with neighbors gathered rapt for the rare televised game.

Talent, made mythic by the collective gaze of the American public.

Football, King of Sports. Baseball, The National Pastime. Basketball still a pick-up game, European football unknown in America, mixed martial arts not yet a twinkle in a savvy promoters eye. Ballpark ticket prices within the grasp of working class families, television — the pipeline into the hearth and hearts of American families — in the firm grip of three broadcasters. The more feminine sports like gymnastics and figure skating spotlighted at the Olympics, along with hockey, and vanished in the four-year wasteland between patriotic salutes, sportscaster rhetoric that transformed their personal triumphs into the might of a nation.

A Time of Heroes.

An era of mass experience, collective imagining. Eroded by self-interests corporate and personal. Felled by technologic innovations. We have seen the curtain. We are braced for bad behavior, the scandalous scandals veering towards parody. We were duped by doping, once, twice. With a swipe of a finger, we will choose others worthy of our attention, temporary adulation. Or ourselves.

We participate in communities to approximate collective experience, a fractionalized reality show, broadcast at will. We create tools to mitigate talent, Auto-tune, Instagram filters, steroid cocktails. Anyone can experience the frisson of attention, the recognition of “friends”, “followers”. Anyone can determine the fate of products, plotlines, by wielding “likes” or scathing reviews with abandon.

Idols toppled. IstaCelebrities raised.

Mythical stories no longer rise in the collective consciousness, story sound-bites trend, blips bobbing in a sea of selfies. Stories writ shrill, to arrest our momentary attention. Stories writ small, held in the palms of our hands.

Although I did not have an ulterior motive this week as I wrote in two spots just blocks away from each other in Manhattan’s Lower East Side (location, location, location), there is a thematic link: both are expansions from talented teams. Caffe Vita is a sliver of a spot from the renowned Seattle coffee roasters (judging by the line out the door, it is no longer NYC’s best-kept secret). Dirty French is the latest and sizzle-iest yet from the Torrisi team (Torrisi, ZZ Clam Bar, Parm), reservations might prove tricky, but I tried my luck at the bar and was well-rewarded for my efforts.

Would you like a story written for you? Suggest a word below:

ratiocination.

October 14, 2013March 18, 2014 / mscharlies / 3 Comments

Ratiocination means “the proposition arrived at by logical reasoning” or “the process of exact thinking” or “a reasoned train of thought”. WordBowl Word of the Day provided by the blogging force behind One of Thirty Voices.

Logisticians, engineers, mathematicians: the original Silicon Valley pioneers staked their claim, threw up low-slung form-follows-function offices to house servers and people alike, charged with improving processor speed or the next leap in enterprise software.

Problem solvers.

BRAVA ROYALE and "ratiocination" at Dream Baby Bar

BRAVA ROYALE and writing at Dream Baby Bar

The goal to increase worker productivity — engineers were “workers” before a new nomenclature transformed them into “team members” — approached with equal rigor. Logical, for a company to provide lunch. Eliminate the need to leave. Encourage employees to eat in front of their monitors. Or, least-optimal scenario, mingle with co-workers in the cafeteria. Next came the on-premise gym, to improve physical stamina for the all-nighters prior to product ship dates. Fully stocked kitchens for sustenance to code. Drop off dry cleaning service arrived. The HR perks matriculated into foosball tables, weekly Beer Bashes, Aeron chairs, the Friday roving cart stocked with wine, flowers, chocolates for last minute dinner party hostess gifts, dates, wifely apologies.

Everyone knew someone who knew someone at a company providing weekly in-office massages.

Business boomed, buildings begat “campuses”, the new seats of higher learning, temples of knowledge. Gave rise to a defining school of interior design, bold, bright, whimsical replacing vast seas of oatmeal cubicles.

Wall Street missed the first few, West Coast IPO blips. Then Netscape, and the overnight Silicon Billionaires. Wall Street would not miss again.

Margarita + Chopped Chilies = logical pairing at El Toro Blanco

The marketeers arrived en masse. They extolled paradigm shifts and first-to-market strategies, touted page view rankings, tracked eyeballs as obsessively as their own stock options, referenced Marc Andreesson or Jim Barksdale or Kleiner Perkins as casually as film producers mentioning celebrity talent attachments. They registered the domain names of every thought that popped into their heads, issued press releases like trial balloons. Launch parties became an Olympics-worthy competitive sport.

The marketeers, they mastered virtuoso techno-marketing spoken word performances designed to dazzle, distract, Do Not Look at the Man Behind the Curtain. The unspoken, pervasive, Cardinal Rule: Do Not Ask (Ever, Ever) “But What Does It/You/They Actually Do? Because you either Got It, thus proclaiming you crossed the threshold of this awesomely unprecedented transformative era of perpetual innovation and prosperity, or you were dismissed as roadkill along the Information Superhighway.

Money, actual money, positive P&L, rendered meaningless, superfluous in this New Economy, the Tech Economy, the Venture Capital Economy, the Wall Street Economy, this universe in which valuation was king.

Up, up, up, as if it were the only direction. The biggest Series A, the highest-profile acquisition, the most successful IPO — was toppled by the next. Expectations defied logic.

bull…

For every Netscape or eBay or Google there came an array of spectacular flameouts: TheGlobe.comPseudo.comBoo.comFlooz.com. The laws of gravity applied. What goes up, most often, does come down. Buildings in San Francisco and Silicon Alley abandoned, bright-colored signage defaced with graffiti, empty Aeron chairs lined up like sentries.

Still, the entrepreneurs come, as do the VCs and the Wall Streeters casting about for the Next Big Thing, placing bets before the next spin of the wheel, visions of IPO glory dancing in their eyes.

Handwriting about IPOs and tech bubbles, I thought of heading down to Wall Street for a little thematic cocktailing, but stumbled across El Toro Blanco (“the white bull”) in the West Village, and Dream Baby Bar in the East village, both of which struck as metaphorically appropriate.

Caffeinated fuel was in the form of “Alphabet City Blend” from Ninth Street Espresso in the East Village.

Caffeine Confusion: 9th Street Espresso, located on 10th Street.

Do you have a favorite word? Drop it in for WordBowl using the form below:

juggernaut.

August 15, 2013January 10, 2015 / mscharlies / 4 Comments

WordBowl Word-of-the-Day provided by Jenny B

children’s literature advocate, writer, reviewer, educator, chanteuse

www.TwentybyJenny.com

1994, Los Angeles — A friendly freelance writer/IT consultant (and future dotcom entrepreneur) offered to show me his computer lab, introduce me to Mosaic the thing that could change everything.

We weaved through Malibu on his bike, my thighs gripping his, ocean crashing to one side, craggy cliffs on the other, words whipped away by wind. Arrived at UCLA, walked through hushed halls, crossed the threshold to humming terminals, sat before a massive monitor. He clicked keys like a conjurer invoking spells, I peered over his shoulder, breathless. He grasped my hand, cautioned patience. We waited, bantered, debated, the mechanical whir of computer equipment morphed into music. We waited. The screen swirled.

aptly-monikered SOCIAL SMOKER cocktail (with smoked mescal float) at Ella's

aptly-monikered SOCIAL SMOKER cocktail (topped with a smoked Mezcal float) at Ella’s

We waited. I shivered, he pulled me onto his lap, wrapped arms around me, we nuzzled as the day’s surf reports appeared onscreen. I attempted to wrap my head around this as we wrapped ourselves around each other, wrap my head around the concept of any necessary or useful or desired information called forth with a few key strokes, and said, well if this thing speeds up, there might be something cool here, and he laughed, and we kissed again, so to me, the Internet was, is, a little sexy.

We West Coast media denizens, entranced by publishing and broadcasting possibilities, embraced the Internet Age. Our Brave New World.

We digital pioneers reveled in our e.mail addresses and 1200 baud modems and the dial-up screech in the background of our calls to the other coast. We evangelized, staked web turf claims, lugged laptops.

And then, Netscape IPO’d. Wall Street awoke, roared.

Ella's jazz-meets-hiphop-meets-piano bar, east village

Ella Lounge, east village, nyc

We attended meeting after meeting, meetings run by fresh-faced guys sporting khakis and not-quite button-downs a particular shade of blue between baby and royal, or presided over by former hippies who caught the tech wave early and rode it to excessive success. They pronounced, with the all-knowingness of prophets, “Portals are the new television networks,” espoused “paradigm shifts”, asserted “first mover status”.

“Game Changer” became as standard an opening salvo as “Hello”.

“Information wants to be free” they cried, dancing for money, venture capitalists. We media-makers did not yet know to do more than shudder. “The totality of human expression at our fingertips”, and we did not yet know to fear for our jobs.

CLARK GABLE cocktail at east village jazz joint Ella

The Bay Area teemed. From all over the country they came — the newly-graduated, the disenfranchised traditional media folks, mid-level management types casting for future financial independence, Baby Boomer executives making one last leap for career glory — people headed West, a late 20^th century Gold Rush of bits and bytes and options.

The Internet steamrolled, indiscriminate. E.mail smashed USPS to governmental rubble. Long distance phone call pricing evaporated. Periodicals and newspapers trumped by perpetual publishing. Music retailing gutted, television viewing fractured. Books priced less than paper. Engineering casual wear trounced corporate dress. Culture reduced to “content”. Roadkill along the Information Superhighway.

“Content is King!”, but the Internet Rules All.

“juggernaut” scribbled at the “Heyday of Hollywood”-evoking piano bar & jazz club Ella Lounge east village, nyc

caffeinated assist from west village staple ‘sNice (which it is!)