Basic Guidelines for Tagging on Flickr. “Only add tags about location, if the focus is on the location! … there is a gap between information that helps you and information that helps all the others.” So like, when I’m looking for photos of Chicago, your pic of that Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax” shirt you found in a Chicago thrift store? Clutter.
lia: best product name ever?
lia: “Coochy Shave – Extra Gentle Shaving Lotion For Private Areas”
andrew: haha
andrew: i shave with “taint” cream
Ah, so meta it hurts.
Also: I really miss having Alaina reachable by subway. Bah.
I can’t remember when or how exactly I stumbled onto Joel Derfner’s A Search For Love in Manhattan, but I do know that I was so impressed by the quality of his writing that I spent the next few hours reading through the entire archives until I was fully caught up, and I’ve been reading faithfully ever since. Derfner’s new book Gay Haiku (which sprung out of a bunch of his blog posts) launched recently and he’ll be doing a reading/signing event in support of it tomorrow, Thursday May 26 at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble on 22nd and 6th. Here’s a snippet from yesterday’s Gothamist interview:
The actual content of your gay haiku covers a wide range of topics, including your dating life, and even in that short format you are pretty forthright about some bad dates. Are you expecting to get any flak for any of the poems?
Yes, especially because I keep running into the people involved. I’ll get on the subway and there will be the guy with the pet tarantula. He won’t recognize me, but the instant I see him the whole terrible experience comes rushing back. I’m just hoping it’ll be like a Molière play; his audiences laughed hysterically without realizing they were the ones he was savaging. I hope the people involved will laugh without recognizing themselves. Or at the very least that they continue not to recognize me.
The undying popularity of godless things like Celine Dion or Riverdance can be attributed to the Eurovision Song Contest. And yet despite that, it’s safe to say that most Americans probably never knew such a thing existed.
Pitchfork’s David Raposa does a great job of explaining the brilliant shining madness that is Eurovision. Make sure you read all the way down to where he describes this year’s entries. I know they will sound totally insane and fictional, right out of The Onion or McSweeney’s, but let me assure you that a) they are real and that b) the competition is equally bizarre every single year.
Eurovision is so awesome I can’t believe it still isn’t broadcast in the US; in Manila I used to stay up late just to watch it live on obscure European channels. I’d love to go to a bar here in New York and watch it along with my fellow pop lovin’ freaks but since I don’t know anywhere to do that, I guess I’ll just have to try and watch it online, thanks to the BBC.
[ via Do You Feel Loved? ]
Nina Lalli on grilling in New York City:
Humans can be divided into many defining sets: cat people or dog people, beer drinkers or cocktail sippers, those who wear gold or those who wear silver. But in New York, the most gratifying and heartbreaking distinctions tend to be real estate-based. With Memorial Day looming in the near future, New Yorkers know who they are: Those who have outdoor space for a barbecue, and the rest of us (we hate you, by the way).
She’s not kidding, the rest of us really do hate you. Yards are too much work but oh what I wouldn’t do for a proper deck or roof to chill out on on slow afternoons, sipping margaritas while I grill some meat and corn. Gah.
I’m still sort of disbelieving that I’m going to be graduating tonight. Not going to the university-wide one (which suffers from the triple whammy of being gigantic, outdoors and in the morning) but the slightly more intimate Salute that’s just for Tisch students. The largest faction is from ITP, which suits me just fine as we will bring the awesome to Madison Square Garden. Got my cap and gown and am ready to go! It’s been the shortest, most fun three years of my life.
Anyway, if you’re in New York the next two days, you really should drop by the ITP Spring Show and see what everyone’s been working on all semester. I don’t have anything in it as I finished my thesis last semester, but volunteered to take photographs so I’ll be there both days; if I’ve never met you before or you can’t find me on the floor, just ask a student if they’ve seen me around. There are a lot of interesting projects so it’ll be well worth your time to drop by.
Some of the ones I recommend you make sure to see are: Meghan Trainor‘s With Hidden Numbers, Robyn Overstreet’s Data Booth, Emily Conrad’s 2mph, Derek Wang’s boards, John Geraci’s FoundCity (pimped out here previously), Matty Sallin’s Presence Frames, Ian Curry’s Pantopic, Karen Bonna’s SubAlerts and Payphone Warriors by Gregory Trefry, Abraham Burmeister, Kenji Sawai, HyungJung Kim and Ron Shely.
Show hours:
Tuesday, May 10th, 5 to 9 p.m.
Wednesday, May 11th, 5 to 9 p.m.
Directions:
ITP is on the fourth floor of NYU’s Tisch School, 721B Broadway corner Waverly Place. You can take the R train to 8th St and walk south two blocks to Waverly, the 6 to Astor Place and walk west to Broadway, or the C to West 4th and walk east through Washington Square Park to Broadway.
I really liked Butch Dalisay’s most recent column for Newsbreak, Why I Left The Church, triggered by the recent hullaballoo over the Philippine government’s Ligtas Buntis program:
I’m glad, in a way, when the Church speaks and thinks like this, because it reminds me of all the reasons why I left it. Sometimes—usually during one Edsa People Power uprising or other—I’m actually tempted to believe that this Church has come out of the Middle Ages and institutionalized the liberal progressiveness it manifests in other aspects of our national life. And then, just about when I feel like going back to church and genuflecting, I get a dose of what some bishop has to say about birth control, divorce, sexuality, women in the clergy, euthanasia, and censorship, and I feel happy and relieved to be away from all that—well, not exactly, since there’s no way of escaping what we used to call “clerico-fascism” in this country of ours.
I still don’t know what “Sussudio” means exactly, but thank you Swifty for bringing Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s cover of the Phil Collins classic to my attention.
Ah, Phil Collins, wildly underrated pop genius. How I love thee. As much as I love both Kelly Clarkson’s single Since U Been Gone and Mssr Ted Leo, I would happily erase all trace of Leo’s live Since U Been Gone cover from my memory if he would only cover Sussudio. Now that would really be this week’s best thing ever.
Holy crap, why didn’t anyone ever tell me Kelly Clarkson’s new single Since U Been Gone was so good? My ears are so happy right now, you have no idea.
(As Merlin said, “It’s, like, scientifically infectious. And you can’t fight science.”)