Kiki and Herb Finally Grow Up—But Is Broadway Ready For It? The always awesome Choire on my beloved Kiki & Herb, in yesterday’s Observer. As the Seattle Weekly said last year, “you haven’t lived till you’ve heard a sozzled drag queen crooning, “Wu-Tang, motherfucker”—or turning the Mountain Goats’ harrowing “No Children” (“I hope I lie/And tell everyone you were a good wife/ And I hope you die/I hope we both die”) into an almost sweet-tempered duet with her long-suffering sidekick.” (Hint: the double cd of their sold-out Carnegie Hall show is amazing.)
Real-Life Eloises. Travel + Leisure’s Lisa Birnbach talks to people who live full-time in NYC hotels, a lifestyle I’ve always thought fascinating and apparently incorrectly thought was on the way out. “It is notable that “room service” tops almost everyone’s list of desirable hotel amenities, even though every imaginable type of cuisine at every level of taste and expensiveness is available through neighborhood delivery. Maybe it’s the removal of room service—the not having to clean up afterward—that really whets everybody’s appetite.” [ via Joe. My. God. ]
“If you catch someone dancing by themselves to a song, you have to tape it and post it on the Internet. Even if it is your mom.” Stephen Sysak caught his mom dancing to Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten. I love that she knows the words to it! So cute. [ via Get Excited ]
I had a few YouTube gems saved up to share this afternoon but YouTube is under the weather, so instead you get to see a video I uploaded to Vimeo and my Vox blog a while back. Jarv barks so rarely that I figured I should capture the moment, so here are 29.01 seconds of my dog doing his fortnightly existential barking at nothing bark:
I love his bark because it’s fairly low pitched and very macho, i.e. not what you’d expect from a small dog, even a fat one. Also: one of his nicknames is wao-wao.
CollegeHumor finally totally sells out to The Man, i.e. Barry Diller, whose IAC/InterActiveCorp just bought 51% in Connected Ventures LLC in a deal Gawker says is “quite a bit higher” than $20 million. Nice!
Big Chill of ’36: Show Celebrates Giant Depression-Era Pools That Cool New York. Fantastic NYT piece about the eleven outdoor pools that opened in the city during the summer of 1936, triggered by the ongoing exhibition SPLASH! A 70th Anniversary Celebration of New York City’s WPA Pools. 77 photos plus historic renderings and never-before-seen color films of the pools, and all for free, at the Arsenal in Central Park.
Foster Care Cinderellas Spend a Fairy-Tale Night. I was really moved by this piece in the LA Times about a life-skills camp for teenage girls and young women leaving foster care, many for the first time in their lives. Eva, who’s been in the system since birth, “doesn’t like it if someone says she’s blossoming like a flower. “I’d much rather be a tree,” she said. “Trees stand still and I just want to stand still.”
dgray_xplane’s favorite photos on Flickr. At a staggering 11,285 photos starred, Dave Gray has more than five times as many favorites as David Jacobs, which is both beautiful and terrifying. How many have you got? (I’ve got 518.)
My favorite poem from this year’s MTA Poetry in Motion selection is by Rumi, the highly influential 13th century Persian Sufi mystic and poet.
Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
After Rumi’s death, his followers founded the Mevlev Sufi order, which you probably don’t know that you know about but you do because we know them today mainly as the whirling dervishes. I’ve always found them visually arresting (photo essay, short video clip) but never knew the story behind it.
The dance, or Sema, is a mystical journey in which “the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth, and arrives at the “Perfect”; then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity, so as to love and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination against beliefs, races, classes and nations.” Which is a fancy way of saying that Rumi was big on humans evolving past all the classifications we cling to—even those of religion. Not something you’d expect from a religious leader today, let alone one born seven centuries ago. I wonder if we’ll ever get there.
Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv, a collection of shivs confiscated from a maximum security prison in the 70s. “By law, prisoners must be provided materials to have an opportunity to prepare their own legal defenses. In the 1980s, typewriters were made available for this purpose: the long, notched “spear” here is the carriage return from a prison-issued typewriter.”