Wordplay

Shop keepers Tara Alexander and Peggy Garvey stock this place stocked with cool booties and jelly sandals and lots of beads. Beaded bracelets, beaded tunics, beaded boxes, beaded headbands.

If you don’t like beads, you probably shouldn’t shop here. I happen to be in the minority that does.

The yelp commenters don’t share my taste, I guess:

“I wouldn’t say this is a total hippie store, but there is a definite whiff of patchouli in the air. Don’t let that dissuade you; take a bite of Mango and taste the colors, man.” – S. M.

“If you use the word ‘groovy’ frequently or like to hug trees, you’d certainly consider this place far out.” – Sean S.

“They have lots of long, flowy dresses and skirts and many cozy sweaters and tops that can be described as as ‘relaxed.’ “-Carrie E.

“HIPPIE ALERT!!!!! HIPPIE ALERT!!!!!  THE WINDOW DISPLAY WAS ONLY A LURE TO GET NORMAL PEOPLE, LIKE MYSELF, TO COME INTO THE STORE AND BE CONVERTED!!!!” -Kimberly P.

(Sorry, had to share)

Anyways, found some things I liked and finally purchased a pair of tribaly earrings to wear with my new headdress while I grind maize from the harvest next to my cornhusk doll collection in my buckskin teepee.

If you’re in Philly and decide to shop around Chestnut Hill, stop by and smell the patchouli.

8442 Germantown Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19118
215-248-9299

A torched cherry-flavored experiment in gluttony and social networking, the folks behind Hotel Thrillist: Miami surely outdid themselves at the Fontainebleau this month. Is it one of those “you check in, but you never check out” types of gimmicks? No. Does it leave a taste of “Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn” in your mouth? Maybe. Did I secrete Boom Boom for days upon my return to New York? Unfortunatleyslashfortunately yes.

So how does one Hotel Thrillist? Step one: Arrive, fashionably whenever (also good if your plane is grounded thanks to exploding lavatories), inspect swag, tweetle several ridiculous photos of you plus swag plus the Fontainebleau, send your coordinates to Nick McGlynn (photographer extrodinaire) via ESP and have him take copious amounts of useless photos of you holding said swag: For instance HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Proceed to tropical storm cocktail hour by the pool, gale-force winds free of charge and surprise yourself by not hating your first Bacardi Torched Cherry and Coke of the weekend. It helped to brave the storm.

Step 2: Wipe off the Florida rain, gussy yaself, and mingle with some damnfabulous people at the Bacardi sponsored pre-dinner fete. Have yourself another TC & Coke and taste a sampling of Miami’s finest culinary delights: Gotham Steak, Hakkasan, Solo, and the most mouth-watering how-can-you-exist truffle polenta from Scarpetta. (I need you.)

Step 3: Without a 5-hour enegry retailer near by, Boom Boom instead and try to sip another TC&C at Liv, the sparklyest upon sparklyest of the Klubz on the beach. Convenient for us, since it’s in the hotel. That’s a step step, trip trip down the hall, tap tap in the elevator, and another hop, jump, and a trip right to the line (which we skipped). Sup.

Performance by J. Cole.

Step 4: Spend the next day swimming in a sea of TC&C under the hot firey Florida sun. Your options include the pool, the cabana, the other pool, the bazaar, the water slide, and THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. If you need to recover/adjust your pupils to the light, there’s a Bobby Flay-worthy grill challenge happening poolside. If you can bear it, slip on ya Stunnas and get some custom quickie couture from Krel. She fits, cuts, clips, twists, rips, and sews you into an organic creation in less than five minutes. What’s not to love?

Performance by Kat DeLuna.

Step 5, 6, 7, 8 and beyond: Head to Red Steakhouse, where they may/may not have great steaks, but they sure do have great desserts. Hide your Harry Potter-esque magically-refilling glass of TC&C  from the tornado lightening, watch a capoeira troupe beat their drums, talk to a parrot, beware the fire dancer, befriend a baby gator (get a lil nostalgic about college), and do your best at battling any self-esteem issues you may have as an onslaught of sex-personified Miami Heat dancers surprise everyone with a jig.

Retreat to Fontainebleau for a–suprise!–TC night cap (no longer an informed decision of your now cherry-tinted taste buds, but a good vs. evil-esque battle between common sense and the Bacardi gods, which you are shamelessly losing) , a little star gazing, and a greater admiration for everyone that invited you there (don’t they work hard!).

Post Hotel Thrillist? Go home and follow all your new friends on twitter: @DevonGiddon @BoomBoomBaby @Marv_Carbonado @Bespoken4 @AsherT @Boehmcke @EmilyGannett @sheerling @chumiston Or just THIS WHOLE LIST.

Miss you, Miami!

(photos by Nick McGlynn/Random Night Out and my polaroid camera…or something).

I:

Posed for a photo at the Buzzfeed office-warming party:

Caught a screening of Sex and the City 3, courtesy of HP and their SATC2 collaboration (hence the HP photo lab pic):

Started a link list on Delicious, you know, just for fun:

Saw GLEE Live! at Radio City, where I was surprised with a signed photo from Lea Michele–a gift from a coworker. Simply delightful.

Sipped some alchemist drinks at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic. DElish. Yes, it was THIS kind of party.

Started DIGGing, as per a work-related request. Social media is, like, hot right now…or something?

Compiled all the HOT social media in a Flavors.me account:

And drank endless buckets of Torched Cherry Bacardi at Hotel Thrillist Miami, this past weekend in south Florida. Many thanks to the folks who made THAT happen.

Coming up? REST.

iPhone + Camerbag app + blooms = new post

Location: Montego Bay, Jamaica

Let’s be honest: It was a three-day free-for-all in the land of jerk chicken and lightening storms so you can only imagine the parts I’m leaving out. But to give Thrillist and JetBlue a little credit, I’ll mention a few things that I remembered I actually did and post THE VERY FIRST photos of yours truly on Wordplay. Yes, I’m THAT excited about this trip:

Arrived knowing ZERO people (found out later that some of us have friends and Murray Hill block apartments in common). Surveyed the journalists/bloggers in the security line: Early judgement=THESE PEOPLE WANT TO PARTY.  

Best JetBlue flight I’ve ever drank Red Stripe on, hands down. Maybe only? UNLIMITED Pom and Red Stripe, UNLIMITED photos being taken of this far-too-early consumption by Thrillist photog Nick McGlynn, UNLIMITED people excited to get out of miserable New York. Also, I took UNLIMITED bathrooms breaks (4!) thanks beer being poured down my throat. 

Got on the bus to the Ibero Star Rose Hall Suites while Thrillist folks read us our rights: Full amenities, all-inclusive drinks and food, 6 bars, infinity pools, individual suites (with swings!) for every guest, personal butler services for every guest, internet access for Tweeting (duh!), and other things I can’t recall because at this point I had drifted off into a hazy funk of “where am I and how in the world did I get this lucky?”

After ogling at my suite for a good 20 minutes “Oh My God, the closet…Oh My God, the bed…Oh My God, the pool-side porch with swing!…Oh My God the 4-people-can-fit-inside-this-thing bathtub!” we clawed our way to the beach for BBQ (jerk jerk jerk jerk), surf-sitting, playing catch with tennis balls (?), pool bar drinking, waitress drinking, vertical drinking, horizontal drinking and one really sad/weird/fun/crazy game of flag football, which you can watch with your own eyes right here, via Abroad’rView.

After the best bath of my life we sipped on Pom and Starbucks cocktails (because who would I be if I didn’t mention our sponsors?!), watched some really talented and scantily-clad Jamaicans dance their asses off, sat by a fire and watching lightening scare the booze our of us, and disco’ed it up on the dance floor. 

DAY 2: Wake up, miss my excursion (7:30 AM for horseback riding? Uh, I’ll take the 11:30 AM beach outside my hotel room instead), think to myself: HOLY CRAP, I’M IN JAMAICA! After more beaching/Roman bathing in the spa, we dressed for a Sandals epic island jam that I CANNOT stop thinking about. Bussed it to Sandals, boated it across the bay to a private white-bedecked food orgy, and proceeded to get my mind blown by the legitness. We drank, we ate, we danced the night away. Rain could not stop us. Exhibit A, B and C:

Most of this is AFTER a monsoon of a storm that left most of us wet, so we decided to go swimming in our finest of whites (always a good idea when there’s cameras around, I find) and the only way to dry off? Shake it real good. The downside of a rain dance party? When the scaffoling falls onto the dancers, injuring 6, sending some to the hospital to discover a broken collarbone because the wet sand gave way at possibly the most inopportune moment in all of time and the universe. After a lull in the festivites, the injured parties were reported as A-OK, and the white party returned to the Ibero Star for a slow but steady “Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night” dancefloor reboot.

Trinity riled up the crowd (confetti! confetti!), causing some Thrillist employees to blush just a tiny bit and every guy in the room to fall instantly in love with the British singer (it’s true: she rocks). And for just a moment–Jamaican time– respected New York journalists dropped their guards, downed their shots, and formed some unlikely friendships in some very unconventional ways… 

JetMystery, you ROCKED my weekend. Give me 300 days and I’ll be ready for round 2.

***

See a LOT more pictures from Random Night Out/Nick McGlynn here.

See a lot of cool videos of our antics from new bud Courtney Scott here. 

See new bud Carson Griffith’s review of the weekend on Guest of a Guest here. 

Check out the awesomness that is Thrillist here and sign up for their newsletter here to see if YOU get invited next year…

If you know me, you know I attended this years Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, TN.

For those lucky few who accompanied me, you also know that it was quite the weekend.

To make the rest of you jealous, and to encourage attendence, here’s a quick clip of a friend with a view of the campgrounds you’ll probably never get to see:

If it looks that’s great from there, just imagine it on the ground…

This is the cover of The New Yorker for June 1, 2009. Pretty nice, eh?

Artist: Jorge Colombo

Medium: Brushes iPhone app

Did you get that? It’s an iPhone painting. Made only from Jorge’s meticulous fingers. Imagine that. Go home, painters. Let your paints dry. Let your canvases collect dust. Sans iPhone and Brushes knowledge, you are nothing.

From The New Yorker:

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.

Here’s how he did it (an app called Brushes Viewer makes a video capturing each step of the process):

Oh, did you want to buy one of the artists iPhone prints? Because you can. A 16 x 20 is only $200.

You think it’s a mockery? Try living here.

NY mag feature: What those who matter first thought of this sleepless city, before they mattered so much.

Some excerpts I like of their first memories of New York–because some strangely remind me of mine and some are just strange:

Cindy Sherman, artist
Arrived: 1977
It was the summer of 1977, and I was terrified of the city. The Son of Sam was going around murdering couples, the city blacked out for 24 hours, the transit strike stopped all the buses, and all of the sudden women who used to wear little pumps to work now started wearing sneakers.

Lauren Hutton, actress
Arrived: 1964
I came to New York for two things: to get to Africa and to find LSD. In those days it was legal. You could get it from this Swiss chemical company, and I met six guys who were very willing to give it to me. But I didn’t like any of them enough to take it, so it took me a few months. As for Africa, I was supposed to meet a friend in New York, and we were going to take a tramp steamer to Tangier.

Diane Von Furstenberg, designer
Arrived: 1970
Coming from Europe, I had expected the city would look modern, and actually, it didn’t. I was a young princess, so I lived on Park Avenue and had some small children and blah blah blah. But we were a young couple, and fairly good looking with a nice title, so we were invited everywhere.

Harold Evans, editor-at-large, The Week
Arrived: 1983
Our first apartment was a disaster: a sublet on Third Avenue for which we paid rent by putting dollar bills in a hat…One day I opened a cupboard and out fell tons of pornography. I shouldn’t have been looking in the cupboard—it wasn’t my apartment.

Danny Meyer, restaurateur, Union Square Café
Arrived: 1980
The first night I moved to New York was the night that John Lennon was shot…So I slept on the floor of some college friends’ apartment, and that weekend I went to Central Park for the Lennon vigil. It was an amazing feeling: a moment of community and realizing that this horrible tragedy had brought that many human beings together. It wasn’t the violent act that scared me as much as it was the beauty of its aftermath that attracted me.

Ira Glass, radio host, This American Life
Arrived: 1984
I rented an illegal sublet that cost me $145 a month; if anyone questioned what I was doing there, I was under strict instructions to say I was visiting somebody. My roommate had come to New York to do art but then had gotten into a dispute with the landlord…She was like a character out of a Tom Wolfe novel—her life had made her crazy—and that just seemed to sum up so exactly something about this city.

Jann Wenner, editor and publisher, Rolling Stone
Arrived: 1977
It was an era of parties, and a great time for drugs and alcohol. Elaine’s was thriving. We felt more than welcomed. New York loves ambitious people—eats them up.

Nick Denton, publisher, Gawker Media
Arrived: 2002
I once made a spreadsheet comparing San Francisco, London, Budapest, and New York. I assigned different weighted scores based on different criteria: old friends, business opportunities, Hungarians, Jews, nature (that one had a fairly low weight). I was living in San Francisco, but I’ve always liked the idea of that city more than the reality of it. So I would play with the spreadsheet, and when I didn’t get the result I wanted, I adjusted the rankings. One factor that tipped things in New York’s favor was that New York had way hotter guys.

Aziz Ansari, comedian
Arrived: 2000
Most nights, I ended up going to bars on a strip of Third Avenue below 14th Street. Bar None, Nevada Smiths: Finally, the experience of shitty college bars, right in New York City! Every year, I would wise up and go one more avenue east to avoid the mess. And every year, one kid in the group would always say we should go another avenue even farther east, because that’s where the good bars are.

Kristen Schaal, comedienne
Arrived: 2000
I was so broke I’d have a slice of pizza for lunch, and I would drink 40s for dinner to fill me up. My roommate and I experimented with all different kinds of 40s…I still keep one unopened can of Crazy Horse on a shelf in my apartment, just to represent that time. I said, I’m going to drink this Crazy Horse when I’m 60 on the French Riviera, topless, and crack it open with the ocean running up my thigh!

*Note: I’ve never had or wanted LSD but would love to go to Africa. I haven’t had any small children, blah blah blah, and I’m only invited some places. Haven’t been to a Lennon vigil, but was in LaGuardia when the plane landed in the Hudson, which I understand is not the same, but still scary. The shitty beautiful college bars are just as shitty and just as beautiful. I haven’t downed a 40 as dinner, yet, but there’s still time. Plently of it.

Illustrator Christoph Neimann plays with LEGOs in Berlin and thinks of New York:

Images from Neimann’s Abstract City blog/the NYT Opinion page yesterday, where you may find more of his miniature tribute.

On further inspection, Neimann seems to have rather amusing rapport with his editors as well as an unhealthy coffee affection–both worth your time to inspect, seeing as it’s mostly visual treats.

His LEGO construction shed some light on our similarities:

He plays with plastic blocks and coincidentally creates charming NY architecture and cultural symbols. I play with plastic cards in my wallet and painfully create credits in my checking account.

However, my bankruptcy = not charming.

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