I missed this story. A single woman ran for mayor in Tampa. I wonder if this flyer is real?
Unmarried: Rose Ferlita has put her political ambition first and foremost, while her opponent is a dedicated family man with two children — Ferlita is an unmarried woman with a suspect commitment to family values.
I always find it curious how those who talk about dating online are majority female. Men seem to have less to say? I’m noticing that at the moment Bad Online Dates has a front page where 7 of the stories are from women and only 1 is from a guy.
Wow. This wins the prize of most embarrassing anecdote that I’ve read today:
“I want 2 lick every inch of your body. I long to have u inside me.” SEND.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that my mother now thought I wanted to lick her body. I’d like to think that my mother and I have a fairly close relationship but not THAT close. This is what happens when you are trying to send a dirty text message to someone named Mark and you accidentally send it to Mom instead. While mortifying as this may have been, after I explained to my mother that I thought we were better off as friends we had a good laugh and never mentioned it again.
“I’M SOCIALLY AWKWARD I was a late bloomer and a over-analytical Capricorn that thinks way too much. I tend to plot out my every move. While that comes in handy when writing and being creative, in social settings that can be a crippling. I’m the wallflower that observes the room when in unfamiliar places and for years my crutch was alcohol, which made my overactive brain shutdown and just let loose. While that led to a great time, it also led to the birth of Taco Meat, my drunken alter ego. I’ve since learned that I don’t need to drink to have a good time but I still have my awkward moments. Plus, my father was/is an alcoholic and I don’t need to follow in his footsteps.
…I’M NOT AN ALPHA MALE If that’s what you’re looking for then you’ve come to the wrong place. My personality is laid back and calm. It takes a lot to get me riled up and I’d much rather play the quiet observer than the loud mouthed center-of-attention seeker. That’s not to say I’m not a leader I just lead differently and recognize that I have a tendency to get overshadowed by your typical alpha male. I’m just another wolf in the pack not the one you notice right away.”
Peddling conventional wisdom and spewing beltway knowledge has and will be lucrative. It gets you good jobs at the Atlantic and a lifetime job at the NY Times. You get to be paid guests on cable news. You get to go out to LA and pal around with Bill Maher or yuk it up with Greg Gutfield on Red Eye. You have every incentive to do EXACTLY what you have been doing, which is spew callous, ignorant nonsense. It literally pays to spew this bullshit, while anyone who disagrees is simply mean and a member of the hard and unserious left.
So that’s what we are dealing with and why. We have a ruling class of lazy, incurious, insulated dullards who value their misguided ideology more than their fellow citizens, and are paid well and rewarded for doing the bidding of the sociopaths in the money party. It’s really that simple.
Jamie Dyer: “Mammon is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful god I’ve ever known in my life.”
I love that sentence.
Saturday night a friend and I went to go dancing at Public Assembly. The DJ was Prosumer, from Berghain (they say “Panorama Bar”, I admit I’m still trying to understand the difference. Aficionados know these things. Panorama Bar is inside of Berghain).
I’m told that some clubs in New York have been trying to have Berghain nights, such as this. They imitate some elements of Berghain, meaning the play late and bring in DJs from Berghain. I think to enjoy these nights you need to accept them as their own thing. They are a little disappointing if you go expecting something like Berghain.
Berghain is arguably the most famous club in the world right now. It started life as a sex club for gay men. Wikipedia gives this history:
Berghain has a strong reputation for decadence and hedonism; a New Zealand Herald article describes “people openly indulging in sexual acts”[6] inside the club, and the basement contains a dark room specifically set aside for that purpose.[2][7][8] Photography is strictly forbidden.[2][9] The door policy is selective and mostly random, but there are no VIP entrance or VIP areas. Special guestlist is restricted to a few guests for each dj and maximally two guests for each staff member. As a special feature, no mirrors or reflecting surfaces can be found anywhere in the club. Like many Berlin clubs, Berghain hosts extremely long events; a Philip Sherburne column in Pitchfork Media describes a Carl Craig set that began at 3:00 Sunday afternoon and continued until the club’s ending time.[2][8] Jesse Rose has described “Entering Panorama Bar is like going back in time to an age when people went out to really party.” [10]
Berghain is the reincarnation of the “legendary” club Ostgut (1998–2003).[2][4][5] This club itself emerged out of a men only fetish club night, called “Snax”, which was held in different locations before it found its permanent home at the new club “Ostgut” as a part of a new concept. Quickly the “Ostgut” developed into a focal point of the Berlin techno-subculture since the venue was now open for all genders on regular nights except on those “Snax” club nights six to eight times a year. “Ostgut” closed down on January 6, 2003 following a 30-hour farewell event, and the former railway warehouse which housed it was subsequently demolished. Berghain opened in 2004.[5][11] The name “Berghain” is a composite of the names of the two quarters, which flank the building south and north: Kreuzberg (former West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (former East Berlin). “Snax” is still held once a year on Holy Saturday in the main room (Berghain), while only the Panorama Bar is open for a mixed crowd.
That maybe makes it sound more exciting than it really is. The night I went, I saw no sex acts, to my great disappointment. But then, I did not wander into those dark rooms reserved for sex. So I guess I wasn’t looking.
I realize this is something of a cliche, but Berghain was somewhat life changing for me. I’ve never before had so much fun dancing. It was the freest environment I’ve experienced, for something like dance.
Anyway, my friend and I went dancing on Saturday night. (Biking at 2 AM in Brooklyn is huge fun, the streets are mostly empty, and the main roads now have bike lanes. It was like being in a European city.) We were going to head over there at midnight, but we were each busy with various knitting projects, so we did not leave till 2 AM (technically, this was Sunday morning). We biked over and then danced till 6 AM. (I wore an earplug in my right ear, though at first I thought the music was not too loud. But then the next morning my left ear hurt, so I knew it had been a good idea to wear at least one earplug. In fact, I probably should have worn 2. I used to hate the fact that these shows were so loud, but I’ve come round to liking how loud they are — the music should make your bones shake, and it needs to be dangerously loud to do that. The best thing to do is wear ear plugs, and then one can safely dance in front of speakers that are blasting your body with sound waves.)
A few impressions: the music was good, but the sound was muffled. There were 100 people packed into a small room. The vibe was that of a party at a friends house, if the friend had a large apartment. At times, there were too many people who were not dancing. In particular (as my friend suggested), a lot of the audience was heterosexual, and this was a problem. At Berghain they’ve people at the door who turn away a lot of the heterosexuals, so that the crowd stays largely queer, and I think this contributes to the feeling of freedom one feels at Berghain. Straight culture has depended on gay culture at least since Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, but you see it vividly at Berghain, or by comparison, at these fake Berghain nights in New York. At Public Assembly, you had a lot of straights who were standing around, drinking, judging, engaging in drama with girlfriends/boyfriends. There is a kind of status competition that creeps in when the room is mostly straights, and you’re in New York. It’s less free.
Having said all that, I still had huge fun. For me, it’s like a form of meditation to get lost in dancing for a few hours, listening to good music. And dancing till dawn. That is part of it. I understand at Berghain people will go Friday night and stay till Sunday morning. There are no windows near the dance areas at Berghain, so one can lose track of time, you don’t know if it is day or night. My friend once went to Berghain on a Sunday morning, and she thought it would be dull, because who goes to a dance club on a Sunday morning, but no, she says it was very good, because the only people there were the core crew that was staying for the whole weekend.
We left at 6 AM. The sun was just coming up. The streets were empty. Brooklyn is beautiful at that hour. It was cold, but I was warm from dancing, so I felt comfortable though I was not wearing a jacket.
We both had our bikes, but we wanted to talk, to compare notes, so we walked with our bikes. We’d both had roughly the same impression of the evening, its strengths and weaknesses.
I’m told that New York had a great dance scene in the 70s and 80s. It does not have one now. Great artistic moments are always fleeting. There is only one Berghain, but it will probably be gone in 5 years. No beautiful scene lasts, the circumstances that allow it change quickly. Berghain is international, and New York is less so. The USA is afraid of terrorists, which means it is afraid of everything foreign. In Europe, a person in Barcelona might finish work at 5 PM, then get on an airplane and fly to Berlin, dance at Berghain from Friday night till Sunday afternoon, then fly home, then go to work on Monday. Cheap airfare and a lack of international boundaries is part of what makes Berghain amazing. Also, cheap rent — the great art scenes tend to be in once great cities that are currently in economic distress, which would describe New York in the 70s and 80s and Berlin right now. Berghain is enormous, it would be very difficult to have a club that big in New York City. The rent would be too high.
And yet, I keep hoping. I’d like to find more places in New York that allow for that kind of dancing. I hope more places keep trying to imitate Berghain.
I bought a new bicycle today. You can click on the pictures below to see larger versions.
Huge fun. I went riding today and the ride was one of the all time high points of my experiences in New York City. Going over the Manhattan Bridge on a bike, and stopping to look out at the awesome view, is one of those iconic moments that allows people to fall in love with New York City.
I’ve been planning to get a bike for a year and I’d always assumed I’d get a road bike. So why did a get hybird that resembles a mountain bike? I woke up this morning and walked to Brooklyn Bikes, near Park Slope, and asked them for a road bike. They were all sold out. This is one of the first warm weekends, and the place was packed with people. They did have a lot of fixed gear bikes (they cater to hipsters) but I did not want one. So I walked back to my neighborhood and tried Bicycle Station:
The guy who runs the place is called Mike. I asked Mike if he had any road bikes and he said no. I really wanted to buy a bike today so I started considering alternatives. I asked Mike if I could test drive the bike above and he said sure, so I gave it a ride outside and fell in love with it — its the only bike I could ever imagine having. It has great gear changing, great grip on roads, and somehow seems resilient to all the shocks that New York road can throw at it. And it was surprisingly affordable for really nice, brand new bike: $300. (The helmet was another $40 and the locks and chains another $40.) Mike was super friendly and very helpful about adjusting my bike for me.
I was stupid with excitement so I went home and showed it my friends at the apartment building where I live.
Then I took off on my first New York City bike adventure. I went down to Dumbo and got something to eat, then I went over the Manhattan Bridge. I went to Chinatown and bought shrimp, for dinner, and then I went up to Soho, to the Apple store, to buy a protective case for my new iPhone.
This was all much safer than I thought it would be. I’d previously worried that biking in New York would be insanely dangerous, but of course the culture is changing and Mayor Bloomberg has been busy building a lot of bike lanes. My friend Lark tells me there are now far more bike riders than when she moved here in 2007. New York City has less bike lanes than Berlin, and the drivers in New York are more aggressive and less respectful, but the difference was not as large as I’d assumed. Of course, I was willing to take it slow — if I’d been in a rush I might have had a different opinion about the danger. (Funny, I think, that I biked around Berlin before I biked around the city where I live.)
