elixir.

December 2, 2015 / mscharlies / Leave a comment

WordBowl Wednesday Reprise in honor of Colman Domingo’s birthday (HappyHappy!). Colman’s WordBowl Word, ELIXIR, proved challenging: an ancient term for a substance that could transform metal into gold or prolong life indefinitely, what could be a modern equivalent?

Originally written a year ago as he decamped NYC for London, this post is hitting as he flys off to shoot Season 2 of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD. As of last season’s cliffhanger, he is not yet a zombie…

Speaking of the dearly departed, two of the three establishments featured in this story are no longer part of the vibrant downtown Manhattan scene. RIP.

On the eve of his departure to London for a limited engagement of his award-winning solo show, A Boy & His Soul (Tricycle Theatre) and to reprise his Tony-nominated role in The Scottsboro Boys (Young Vic), WordBowl Word-of-the-Day “elixir” from

Colman Domingo

Actor. Playwright. Director. Photographer. Collaborator. Creator.

Fingers dancing, racing, drumming syncopating — almost, close — to the bombastic beats in his brain, crazy code streaming, screaming from his fingertips, he is in the zone, the Matrix, he is the Matrix, master, architect, builder, creator, executor.

He can’t type fast enough, he will go faster, faster, his head and his computer one beating organism. He barely, briefly pauses to throw back his spiked Red Bull, tepid and sickly slicking down his throat, chin. ClickClackClicketyTap. Focused. Clear. KILLING IT.

Way better than the skid-skittery of his last Adderall stint, this new stuff, this mixing of Old/New, this all-nighter in the company bullpen, solo flying, solo dancing with the pressure on — big money meet in the a.m. — he is ON, he is SHIT.

Nooooooooooooooooshittyshitshit.

OLOROSO SANGRE TRABEJADERO Sherry, elixir of the gods, a vacation to Spain without leaving the barstool (The Beagle, nyc)

Stop. He has not Lost It. Back up. Review. Line by line. Scan. See. Eliminate. Edit. Fixityfixfix. Stop. Crack the whole thing wide open. Follow the trail, follow the trail, follow the code, get inside the code, imbue the code with his secretsauce, chase himself down the rabbit hole all the way to Wonderland, find it, FOUND IT, the kernel, the essence, the key to NEXT, the frontier beyond Web 2.0, even 3.0, this is Fourth Dimension shit. Shift the course of human interaction, evolution. Fundafuckingmental.

And his code, clean, a sparkling stream.

He shouts into the void, Oh HELL YEAH. He needs to wii or drum, both of which are available at his apartment, but he has been cited — multiple citations — neighbor complaints, those J.O.B. nine-to-fivers objecting to his unregimented bursts of stimulation, inspiration.

As if the gods, the muses, punch a timeclock.

When this hits, he’ll buy the building, kick them all to the curb. Fill it with people like him. He high-fives an invisible friend, champion. Himself.

This is REVOLUTION, they will usher in a whole new way to engage, absorb information. Jack-streamed into the bloodstream, the infostream.

LEMON VERBENA SAZERAC (oh-so-subtle iteration of the classic) at Saxon & Parole

The ultimate algorithm, every moment of interaction exclusive to you, encasing you in a sentient bubble, sensing and synthesizing data, bespoke knowledge, interactivity not just tailored to but designed for your specific needs, tastes, desires, both articulated and innate.

Texts his co-founder, sleeping in preparation for the big meet tomorrow — today? —with the potential new VCs, because this is the forshizzleshit.

Times like this he wishes he smoked.

Dashes to the kitchen for a beer, keg tapped out, nothing in the fridge as they await the bridge financing to take them to the other side and he has done it, DONE IT, you-centric Nirvana and whoever — his co-founder, the Board, the VCs — will figure out the monetization shit cuz this is MIDAS.

Forget the Fountain of Youth, immortality. This life, this mortal life, with you at the center, served by data as acolytes once served the gods.

God of You. Served by the stream.

He sits down. Thrums thumbs against thighs. Pours himself back into the flow, coding towards You-topia.

The (hand)writing of “elixir” required inspirational cocktails at Saxon & Parole (on the Bowery, nyc) & some stimulating sherry at The Beagle (Yes, again! There’s cocktail alchemy going on behind the bar) as well as superlative caffeine at Bowery Coffee.

Bowery Coffee

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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:

elixir.

August 22, 2013September 4, 2014 / mscharlies / Leave a comment

Colman Domingo

Actor. Playwright. Director. Photographer. Collaborator. Creator.

Nooooooooooooooooshittyshitshit.

OLOROSO SANGRE TRABEJADERO Sherry, elixir of the gods, a vacation to Spain without leaving the barstool (The Beagle, nyc)

And his code, clean, a sparkling stream.

As if the gods, the muses, punch a timeclock.

When this hits, he’ll buy the building, kick them all to the curb. Fill it with people like him. He high-fives an invisible friend, champion. Himself.

This is REVOLUTION, they will usher in a whole new way to engage, absorb information. Jack-streamed into the bloodstream, the infostream.

LEMON VERBENA SAZERAC (oh-so-subtle iteration of the classic) at Saxon & Parole

Texts his co-founder, sleeping in preparation for the big meet tomorrow — today? —with the potential new VCs, because this is the forshizzleshit.

Times like this he wishes he smoked.

Forget the Fountain of Youth, immortality. This life, this mortal life, with you at the center, served by data as acolytes once served the gods.

God of You. Served by the stream.

He sits down. Thrums thumbs against thighs. Pours himself back into the flow, coding towards You-topia.

Bowery Coffee

Would you like to play WordBowl? Fill in the info below!

stump.

July 3, 2013July 3, 2013 / mscharlies / Leave a comment

WordBowl Word-of-the-Day: “stump” courtesy of New Yorker-by-way-of-Baltimore,

fearless actor/daredevil surfer Edelen McWilliams

She lives breathing recycled air: plane, hotel, convention center. Walking on, sleeping in, sitting on unnatural fibers, lurid patterned fabrics designed to mask high-volume human traffic, bodily stains, personal detritus. She swipes hand sanitizer over most of her exposed skin, still, her nostrils are raw, eyes red-rimmed, ears metaphorically cotton-stuffed, her head, too, she notices, in rare moments of response, as a flight taxis the runway, devices off at the demand of disgruntled flight attendants.

“Not Forever” the mantra at these moments, repeated to her husband, to their basset hound whose mournful expression predated her decision to bootstrap a startup.

She is frequently introduced on daises as a “futurist”, a misnomer, as the future is here, now, as immediate and tangible as the devices in hand, the devices upon which all is explored, consumed, shared. Paradigm Shift. Fundamental disruption of the consumer product construct, the creator/manufacturer/producer to consumer/audience/buyer relationship. Hell, there are no buyers anymore. Subscription access, Freemium app models, the New Economy.

“Data (you fuckers)”, she wants to shout, but refrains. She wraps her simple message in a calculated mix of flattery and forewarning. “Actionable knowledge” she says, in venture capital boardrooms sipping designer coffee with two hands, not trusting a solo hand, a quivery hand betraying the disparity of her food-to-coffee-ratio. They get it, conceptually, these VCs, the questions lobbed back focus on market size, penetration, scale.

The market, the market. This Little Piggy went to market.

She needs a fucking major market player on board, just one, the first one, to establish consumer traction, define the market. The rest will follow. The significant players in this legacy space, they scrabble, scratch for second-mover status. The go gung-ho for silver, settle for bronze.

The seed money will last, cutting it close, it will last. Or she can dip into the last 401K from her single days, an account from a short-lived stint nearly forgotten. Found money.

Living on the cusp, every hour a new idea, iteration. Not monetizing, but. Exhilarating. The business model is somewhere, close, she will pivot until she nails it. She may lose some of her people in the process.

A ponytailed Millennial offers a bottled water, eyes shining, mouth gushing, the future, the now future, running roughshod over all that came before.

Drunken Horse (despite name, a refined wine bar) chelsea, nyc

She strides up to the stage, nimble, like her hanging-by-a-thread company, greeted with thunder, applause, for the briefest of moments she is Jobs-meets-Wozniack, Garage Google.

She will convince them all, this roomful of men in casual wear and determined women, and their bosses and the ultimate decision makers and the real money guys, because DATA will shape their future, shore up their investments, provide a path to profitability.

She has thousands of digital followers who believe. Conceptually.

She positions the microphone, tests a breath. The audience shifts, prepares to embrace, tweet, disseminate. She dials up the smile. She speaks.

Evangelizes.

Pontificates.

She will figure out the money. In the future.

Post written with a “Picnic” cocktail at Brasalina hell’s kitchen, nyc

Post re-written with a crisp white at Drunken Horse (ha!) chelsea, nyc

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