Learn Something Useful

Home Depot offers FREE seminars on weekends. Swing by and learn something that will provide you with skills to improve you and your family's lives.

Classes include:

Bathroom Renovations
Interior Painting
Tile Design and Tools
Storage Solutions
Cabinet Refinishing & Replacing
Tiling Techniques

Just a few...

Old sayings exist because there is sometimes value in them.

I've always liked "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime."

10. Essentials

10. "Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying"



I have a tattoo. This phrase from The Shawshank Redemption serves as a remembrance of things past, a desire to stay in the moment, and Carpe Diem.

10 Essentials

9. Watch / Bracelet.




Both gifts from my lady. I love the classic styling of this $30 watch. Patterned off of Vietnam era Hamiltons and more original than the J. Crew incarnation, it's reliable, good lookin', it takes a lickin' and you know the rest. The Bracelet is from Giles and Brother. They do amazing work. I wear them every day.

10 Essentials

8. Journal



I carry a journal with me. I keep lists, right poems, sketch designs, store memories...Mine was a gift. It's leather bound and has a spiral notebook inside. The older it gets, the better it looks and feels.

10. Essentials

7. Banker's Envelope



I carry a Banker's Envelope from Jack Spade. I store books, bills, documents, and my journal in it. It is emblematic of diligence and hard work. It has character.

10 Essentials

6. Barbour Jacket



I love things with utility. I love the authenticity of waxed canvas. Barbour makes an amazing coat, the Classic Beaufort. It's warm and waterproof. It can be re-waxed and repaired. It will last forever and gets better looking and more comfortable with age. It is my go to coat.

10 Essentials

5. Tiffany's Key Chain.



I was given a plain Tiffany's keychain by a close friend some years ago. My initials are monogrammed on it. Though some find these trifles banal, it is important to carry things that help remind me of those whom I love and represent.

10 Essentials

4. Clark's Desert Boots.



I love desert boots. They're pieces that get more and more comfortable and better looking with wear. I got my first pair in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, in 1999. They go with everything, wear forever, and are reasonably priced. I'll wear them for the rest of my life.

10 Essentials

3. Raw Denim.



James Dean, Marlon Brando. These guys wore raw denim. APC and Jack Spade both make a nice raw, selvedge denim jean. Jack's are made in North Carolina and California. Never wash them. I mark the date of purchase in marker on the inside of the front pocket. I get to see them change and gain character. I wear them everyday. They can be used with a blazer as well as an old t-shirt.

10 Essentials

2. A Pocket Knife.



My Grandfather used to say, "A Gentleman carries a handkerchief and a pocket knife." I carry a small spyderco on my keychain. It's there for boxes, mail, fruit, meat, bread, thread...anything. And as the saying goes, it's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

10 Essentials

I like GQs 10 Essentials. What are yours?

http://www.gq.com/about/ten-essentials

I will do mine one at a time:

1. A handkerchief.

I get mine in sets of five or ten at various department stores. Brooks Brothers and other places make them WAY TOO BIG. They seem to think they're making bandannas (I would know, I'm from Texas). Go with the less expensive type at Marshalls or some place like it, 100% Cotton.

Plain white- Get them monogrammed with initials or a funny saying, individualizing them...get playful with the thread color too...Make them YOURS.

The Brown Buffalo

check out this site:

www.thebrownbuffalo.com

Douglas Davidson runs it- guy's been collecting luggage and bags for 15 years.

Dynamic, dedicated stuff.

We need all of these kind of things that we can get.

Join his blog too, I did:

http://hypebeast.com/blog/douglasdavidson/

Firewood Carrier

Get your father or father-in-law a log carrier. It's masculine, he doesn't have one, and it'll look great next to the fire...Jack Spade makes a good waxwear piece.

Winter Poets

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

By Robert Frost

Robert Frost is a wonderful poet for the Winter. Pull up a seat by the fire with his Collected Works and take in the season.

Holiday Designs

A quick and elegant manner of adding some holiday spirit to your place...Save your pickle jars from the grocery, soak them- removing the labels and glue. Fill them to various capacities with silver bells from the hardware store. It's only a few dollars, and will add some masculine holiday cheer.

Glass

I'm getting more and more interested in working with glass. I like wired safety glass- 70's science lab style, but it all works.

Christmas

We may not have much, but MAKE yourself a nice holiday- make an effort to get into the spirit of the times.

Culture Fix in the NYTimes

Art That’s Best Seen Through the Bottom of a Glass

Culturefix is a combination bar and gallery on the Lower East Side/Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times
With notable exceptions like long-distance running, any-distance driving and matters of personal hygiene involving sharp blades, most activities go down easier and happier with a drink in hand.

This certainly applies to the viewing of art, which can otherwise be too passive an affair — at least for me. It’s safe to say that if museums permitted visitors to tote stiff, cold gin martinis, I’d be a veritable squatter at the Louvre and on infinitely more intimate terms with Michelangelo.
Alas, they don’t. But Culturefix, a combination bar and gallery on the Lower East Side, does. It won’t let you gaze upon art with a martini per se, but that’s just because its liquor license covers only beer and wine. So perhaps a glass of grüner veltliner or a stein of German ale is what you’ll carry as you wander from the front of this multichambered, multicharmed establishment to the back, where the paintings (or whatever else Culturefix is displaying) hang.

Spirits have long been a big part of spectator sports. Of live music, too. But apart from the perfunctory pinot grigio at many a small-circle gallery opening, the integration of cocktails and chiaroscuro isn’t nearly as routine. Maybe that’s best. Red wine stains aren’t the easiest to remove, and it would be a shame to lose a masterpiece to a merlot.

Even so, there have long been scattered opportunities around town to have your art and drink to it too — in a fashion. While the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis New York hotel is first and foremost a watering hole, it is defined, really, by the “Old King Cole” mural, painted by Maxfield Parrish in 1906 and treated to a $100,000 restoration just three years ago.

There are also murals — entrancing, wraparound ones — at both of the magazine editor Graydon Carter’s Manhattan restaurants, the Waverly Inn in the Village and the Monkey Bar in Midtown.

And a wraparound mural is what all those drawings by the illustrator of the Madeline books add up to at Bemelmans Bar, on the Upper East Side. But in a room so dark, they essentially play the role of wallpaper, the visual equivalent of ambient noise.

Besides, I get the sense that few Bemelmans bons vivants notice them, just as I too infrequently hear people who have been to the Rose Bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel rave about the art in and around it, by Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rose Bar is essentially a liquid gallery that gets credit for the liquid part only, and maybe for the velvet upholstery and chessboard floor as well.

So I was intrigued to hear about the opening this year of two bars on the Lower East Side that conceived of — and advertised — themselves as spaces for the exhibition of art too. Culturefix is one; the other is called Panda.

I hit Panda, on Chrystie Street, first. It’s a raw, ramshackle place that looks sort of thrown together and half-baked. I don’t mean grunge chic; I mean just grunge.

The small bar in front stocks hard liquor as well as beer and wine, but doesn’t have an extensive or inspired selection of any of those. I took a chance on the red sangria, figuring an operation this modest wouldn’t bother with sangria if it didn’t have a tasty trick up its sleeve. I figured wrong.

And yet I wasn’t unhappy here. That I could take my sangria for a walk —and that the walk could lead to a back area with ample elbow room — were pleasing anomalies in space-crunched Manhattan. In that back area I unhurriedly examined about a half-dozen paintings, including two portraits of black women with majestic presences by an artist named Francis Simeni. I also gazed upon a pink neon L-O-V-E sign in which the L and O weren’t illuminated.

“What’s the significance of that?” I asked the bartender, who had left his post and was ambling around. I tried to sound all thoughtful and art critic-y.

“It’s just broken,” he said. “And it’s not art. The artists keep asking us to get rid of it, because people keep making that mistake.”

Culturefix is on Clinton Street, and it’s a more composed affair through and through, opened by two refugees from Jeffrey Chodorow’s restaurant empire: Ari Stern, 33, who worked as a chef, and Cole Schaffer, 25, who worked as a manager.

Their wine choices aren’t utterly obvious — there’s a Côte de Gascogne blanc, for example, by the glass, for $6 — and the beer selection is even more interesting, with more than half of the dozen choices ($4 to $9) brewed in New York State. Mr. Stern also executes a limited menu of small plates ($4 to $12), including braised pork cheek and roast duck, and occasionally converts the bar into a dining room for a multicourse chefs menu he calls Dinnerfix. It is announced about a week in advance on the Culturefixny.com Web site and Facebook page, and costs anywhere from $50 to $150, depending on ambition and theme.

To reach the rear gallery space, which is furnished with tables, chairs and a long couch, you walk up a festively painted ramp from the bar. This back area is used for a variety of musical and culinary events and private parties; on the night I stopped by, there were about eight people taking a “Joy of Cheese” seminar.

Their high-lactose chatter formed an aural backdrop to my perusal of nearly 20 painting and drawings by about a dozen artists, one of whom really got under my skin. His name is Geoffrey Carter, he works with charcoal and graphite on paper, and his vaguely deformed, archaic characters and lugubrious landscapes might well be labeled prairie macabre. I was riveted, unsettled and glad I had that Gascogne blanc to steady my nerves.

Up another ramp, back in the direction of the street, is a store connected to the bar and gallery. Called Dijitalfix, it’s a new outpost of an established Williamsburg, Brooklyn, business that sells whimsically designed desk and office paraphernalia, unusual calendars and electronics accessories with as much of a premium on design as on function.

Its manager, Ruth Gruca, is an evening’s entertainment all her own, so quickly and deftly does she extrapolate and celebrate the virtues of any item you touch, pause over or comment on.

I admired a camera.

“It’s really exciting!” she chirped.

I said a computer bag was handsome.

“And it’s really durable,” she added, within a nanosecond.

My companion said a pair of headphones was shockingly comfortable.

“They’re like feathers,” Ms. Gruca marveled. “They’re like La-Z boy chairs for your ears.”

Then she really got our attention, informing us that any purchase in the store meant a free drink from the bar. I bought a BlackBerry accessory and some ridiculously fancy alternatives to Post-It notes, totaling about $35. These two items meant two free drinks, a value of $15.

And in this store my wineglass was welcome: I sipped as I browsed. What do you know? Shopping turns out to be yet another activity abetted and enhanced by a tipple.

From: The New York Times, November 26, 2010 by Frank Bruni

WHIT Press

New press for WHIT.
If you've ever wanted to get involved in amazing pieces backed by equally amazing people, get your girlfriend into WHITs clothes. Mine is.

http://www.refinery29.com/whit-spring-2011-lookbook.php

From: November 17, 2010

Light Up the Park

A light bulb installation in the flatiron district...I love New York, especially the leaves in Autumn- it's a special time.

Street Fashion

Though I can't say I like this man's wet suit blazer, it does bring new meaning to the term scuba suit...tip your waitress.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer is at the Gagosian Gallery....Thanks Rose!

The Highline in November #3

Park in Autumn

The Highline in November #2

Romance for free.

The Highline in November #1

Spent an incredible day on the Highline, in the Galleries, and on the streets...

Ray LaMontagne

Can I Stay? By Ray LaMontagne:

Can I stay here with you till the morning
I am so far from home and i feel a little stoned
so can i stay here with you till the morning?
There`s nothing i want more than to wake up on your floor
So lay with me in your thinnest dress
fill my heart with each caress
between your blissful kisses, whisper
darling, is this love?

So can I stay here with you, till the day breaks?
There`s something you should know
I ain`t got no place to go
So can I stay here with you, till the day breaks
How happy it would make me to see your face when I wake
So lay with me in your thinnest dress
Fill my heart with each caress
Between your blissful kisses, whisper
Darling, is this love?

So can I stay here with you till the nighttime
I`ve fallen sad inside and I need a place to hide
So can I stay, here with you, through the nighttime
I`ve fallen so sad it`s true, now won`t you take me to your room
Lay with me in your thinnest dress
fill my heart with each caress
between your blissful kisses, whisper
Darling is this love?

Whisper to me, is this love?

Thanks Hill.

Election

VOTE.

It is your civic duty. People die for the opporunity- tomorrow morning, go to your local polling place.

http://gis.nyc.gov/vote/ps/index.htm

Happy Voting.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is a feature-length independent documentary by Chicago Director Yony Leyser, in collaboration with BulletProof Film, Inc.

The film features never before seen footage of William S. Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues including John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Sonic Youth, Anne Waldman, George Condo, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, V. Vale, David Ohle, Wayne Propst, Dr. William Ayers, Diane DiPrima, Donovan, Dean Ripa (the world's largest poisonous snake collector), and many others, with narration by actor Peter Weller, and soundtrack by Sonic Youth.

The film investigates the life of legendary beat author and American icon, William S. Burroughs. Born the heir of the Burroughs’ adding machine estate, he struggled throughout his life with addiction, control systems and self. He was forced to deal with the tragedy of killing his wife and the repercussions of neglecting his son. His novel, Naked Lunch, was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer testified on behalf of the book. The courts eventually overturned their decision in 1966, ruling that the book had important social value. It remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century. William Burroughs was one of the first to cross the dangerous boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950s, and write about his experiences. Eventually he was hailed the godfather of the beat generation and influenced artists for generations to come. However, his friends were left wondering, did William ever find happiness? This extremely personal documentary breaks the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is the first and only
posthumous documentary about this legendary figure.

From: http://www.williamsburroughsthemovie.com/

THE FILM OPENS NOVEMBER 17th- See it.

Inflatable Photo Studio

New York City-based photographer Brian Hedenberg has created a portable photo studio that can be installed on even a sidewalk in minutes. The Inflatable Photo Studio is made from a thick black plastic material and is available in different sizes. The studio has two entrances, an air vent and can be folded into a 2′ x 2′ x 4′ box. At only 40 lbs., the Inflatable Photo Studio can be carried anywhere easily and looks ideal for photographers who don’t want to pay the high price of renting a regular studio. Brian takes orders from his site to custom build these studios. A large Inflatable Photo Studio equipped with a fan will cost around $500.

From: http://www.psfk.com/2010/10/inflatable-photo-studio.html

This is going to become the standard for professional photography.

Collaborative Gout

With everyone and their dog "collaborating" on everything from shoes, jackets, colognes, and wallets...It's WAY PAST time for everyone do go back and do their own work.

I was always irked by the kid that showed up on the last night of the science project anyway.

Halloween Dog Parade

Jack Spade sponsored the East Village Halloween Dog Parade- Sharks are circling the dog run!!

Photos II

Just keep snappin'.