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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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The Exhausting Work of Staycationing

When leaving the house is impossible, cocktails, caftans, and karaoke are all the vacation you need

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She’s writing from the Philadelphia home in which she’s sheltered and convalesced since March.

Two weeks before the city of Philadelphia went into lockdown, I was in an airport in Ixtapa, Mexico, staring at a travel advisory about the coronavirus. It was early enough that the sign was asking if you’d recently traveled to China or Italy; early enough that it was small and had come off a laser printer and was taped near our airline’s check-in desk.

We’d spent the week at a resort on the Pacific coast with a fellow writer couple, taking our first real vacation — our first travel experience without a restrictive budget or attached work or other obligations — in our adult lives. There’d been a break in my book tour schedule, and I took it. I wanted to read, eat seafood, see the ocean, and swim in an infinity pool, and I’d done all of those things. I even had the patchy mix of a tan and sunburn to prove it.

I did thousand-piece puzzles and re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read books and stared into space.

I’m a speculative writer and a hypochondriac. I’ve written stories about pandemics; imagined their slow and terrible creep, the way they stifle and challenge. Still, back in February we had not been to China or Italy. We flew home. We hugged our friends goodbye and declared the vacation a success. Let’s do it again next year, we said. When we unpacked, everything in our suitcases smelled like vacation: sunblock, salt, chlorine. I inhaled every piece of clothing before I put it in the hamper.

You know what happened next, of course. Coronavirus crested and broke on our shores and we, Americans — leaderless, stubborn, foolhardy to the end — were uniquely unsuited for thriving or survival. The welcome pause in my travel schedule turned into a monthslong quarantine that has not yet abated. My wife, Val, began to work from home. I did thousand-piece puzzles and re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read books and stared into space. I talked on the phone with my girlfriend, Marne, who was quarantined with their aunt and uncle on Long Island; I read out loud to them from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a few pages at a time. Our ancient beagle mix, Rosie, went from overjoyed with our presence to vaguely neurotic, shadowing us everywhere we went, unable to be left alone for even a moment. Still, we were luckier than most. We were safe, able to do our work from home. Plus, our house had enough space that we didn’t want to murder each other.

We decided to pull a new tarot card each morning.

A couple of months into lockdown, I was approved for some long-awaited ankle surgery. A few weeks later, a post-op complication with the incision felled me. My doctor put me on hardcore antibiotics that kept me awake for days and made me manic. (“Maybe I can sleep like this,” I’d apparently insisted to my horrified wife, twisted into a bizarre pretzel on our living room couch; I have no memory of the incident.) I was also prescribed a wound-vac, which turned out to be a medical fetish object that relieved pressure on the incision through a gentle sucking organ; the experience is not entirely unlike being seduced by an octopus. I made jokes about “fresh, organic Carmen juice” and watched liquid move through the tube and listened to the creature’s gentle burbling when everything was quiet. A few weeks later, I was given a skin graft that had been grown in a pig’s bladder. It was thin as tissue paper. My doctor told me I still couldn’t bear weight on that foot, and I had to continue to use my mobility scooter to get around. I left the appointment in a terrible mood, blasting System of a Down at full volume.

It was Marne’s idea to pitch a staycation. It’s a hateable word, as overused and near-meaningless as “self-care.”

As my infirmity stretched on and on, my girlfriend decided to temporarily move in with me and my wife to help out. “I guess it’s like Big Love over there?” their aunt asked. It was certainly specific enough of a scenario to be prestige TV: polyamorous writer dykes and their internet-famous geriatric hound riding out a pandemic and a climate-change-worsened heat wave in a rambling Philadelphia Victorian.

This was how Eater found me: Did I want to go camping and write about it? asked a very nice editor. Did I want to do a road trip? Maybe stay at a cabin in the woods? It’s the new American vacation; socially isolated, iconic.

We were tempted. We spent time scrolling through listings for beach houses and lake houses, but the necessary elements — within a reasonable driving distance, dog-friendly, scooter-accessible, on a body of water, and affordable — seemed impossible.

“Vacation-style eating” included lobster rolls with a side of hound.

The Death Card on day 1 signaled a time of transition.

It was Marne’s idea to pitch a staycation. It’s a hateable word, as overused and near-meaningless as “self-care.” And it has a distinctly American flair to it: our inability to take actual breaks, the way we accept lack of real vacation the way, say, Europeans never would. And how does one create a true staycation? That is, a vacation from home that feels genuinely relaxing and separate from the everyday grind, not just an excuse to binge seven seasons of The Great British Bake Off?

Val and I had our recent perfect vacation as a kind of platonic ideal. I loved the understated luxury of the experience: I swanned around in caftans and bathing suits, swam, ate well and always al fresco, read a ton, was good about staying off the internet, and was generally oblivious to the apocalypse inching towards us (that is, mostly stayed off Twitter and turned off New York Times news alerts). This both translated easily to a staycation — outfits, reading, and staying off the internet were well within my grasp — and not at all. We don’t have a pool. We’d have to cook ourselves. The outdoors are full of mosquitos, and getting to them required me to climb down flights of stairs with one functioning leg.

Val, on the other hand, had primarily enjoyed our trip’s lack of responsibilities: no cooking meals, no walking the dog. Her staycation version of this was doing everything she wanted — puttering around in the backyard, harvesting produce from her plot in the community garden — and nothing she didn’t. Marne had different ideas: They wanted to make something. Their idea of a vacation was buying a new cookbook and trying a bunch of different recipes. Everyone agreed on one thing: We wanted to be able to swim, or something akin to it.

I ordered a self-inflating adult-sized kiddie pool from the internet. An ice cream maker, too, and David Lebowitz’s The Perfect Scoop (recommended by Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen) and a portable projector to have a drive-in movie experience in the backyard. (My idea; as a child, drive-ins were one of my favorite parts of summer.) We agreed on a set of principles: to stay off social media as much as possible; eat frequently and well; do our own personal activities that we enjoyed and come together when we wanted to. We would share the cooking, make one night a takeout night, and have brunch on Sunday.

And we decided to pull a single tarot card each morning, as a way of bringing ourselves into the day. Val is a long-time tarot enthusiast; I am generally suspicious of woo-woo but find tarot to be a pleasing intersection of art and the language of the subconscious. And of us love the act of ritual. So yes, we said. Tarot it would be.

Cheap flip flops and pool lounging (here, by Marne) are part of the normal summer excess.

On day one, Marne pulled the death card, of course. The deck is the Carnival at the End of the World, and the death card is a scythe-bearing skeleton on a dead horse upon a hill of decapitated heads. Marne barked with laughter and then, slightly freaked out, left the room to collect themselves. Val had to explain that, unlike in the movies, a death card was rarely bad. It was powerful but positive. It was about transitions, changes. Exactly the sort of card you’d expect to kick off a move from the harried hours of real life to a true break.

But we weren’t ready, not yet. The house was a mess, something I knew would impede me from enjoying vacation fully. We’d ordered a new bed frame a few weeks before that should have been assembled, but it was missing a necessary piece; said piece had only shown up the day before. So the bed needed assembling, too. Oh, and there was dog hair everywhere: lining the couch cushions, floating like tumbleweeds across the hardwood. I realized that this was the piece of vacation I missed the most: arriving in a new, clean space with your responsibilities wiped clean. Not having to fuss about details because someone else has fussed about them for you. But that sort of vacation has evaporated into the ether, so we agreed to just power through a final act of cleaning and organizing and assembling, and have our vacation start at happy hour.

We hardly noticed the strange smell that was developing in the backyard.

And it did. At 5 p.m., I made us a batch of cocktails — bastardized Pimm’s cups, complete with cucumber, mint from Val’s garden, and dried orange slices. I put on Taylor Swift’s Folklore, which had dropped the day before. Then we made dinner: corn risotto, whose page in Cook’s Illustrated we’d dogeared and been salivating over for days; seared scallops; and fried artichokes. We got slightly tipsy and marveled at the recipe’s fussiness: pureeing corn cob milk with fresh kernels and then squeezing the liquid out of the resulting pulp. Val shucked, Marne made the rice. I hyper-focused on my task, pressing the mixture down with the back of a spoon, staring at the measuring cup. It was the first time in a month that we’d all cooked together, and the process felt light and almost labor-less. The jumbo scallops sizzled and browned and looked restaurant-elegant; the artichokes seared beautifully.

It was as fine a summer meal as I’d ever eaten. We sat at the dining room table with the windows open; replaced the fading sunset with the light from an overhead fixture. After the food was gone, we moved from subject to subject. Marne maintained that while the risotto was delicious, corn is best served on the cob. We meditated on the true meaning of the Death card we’d drawn. Was it about using up the week’s leftovers? Finishing assembling the bed? We moved on to the topic of ejaculation (comma, my ex-boyfriends, comma, their ex-girlfriends). After dinner, we watched two episodes of Steven Universe — aptly, the ones that introduce a polyamorous character, the Gem Flourite — and climbed into bed feeling very satisfied with ourselves.

Marne made biscuits for Sunday brunch.

Saturday morning, we sat in my office and drank coffee and drew the emperor. This deck’s version of the emperor is a eyeless gentleman elephant standing on a mountain of tusks. It is considered a sign of stability and material wealth. It made sense, then, that we remembered to make a batch of milk-chocolate-raspberry ice cream so that it would be ready in the evening. It made sense that a particularly beautiful cream-and-cocoa silk chiffon caftan that I’d ordered a month ago from Jibri arrived in the mail, and I put it on with nothing underneath. It made sense that we ate leftovers — practical! — and then made our way outside, where I read Jennifer Egan’s The Keep beneath a fringed umbrella and Val and Marne blew up the inflatable pool and paddled around, insisting I join them while I demurred. It made sense that we ordered out for dinner, and could not decide between New England-style lobster rolls and bright summer salads (corn, grilled peach, and scallion; watermelon and feta), from Philly summer pop-up Anchor Light, or Lebanese plates and dips (from Suraya: hummus and baba ghanoush and labneh and tabbouleh; charred runner beans and fried cauliflower in hot-mint yogurt and lamb kebabs and crispy batata harra), so we ordered both. We sat and ate and Val and Marne went back in the water and I finished reading as the light bled from the sky. We hardly noticed the strange smell that was developing in the backyard. We went inside and our ice cream was waiting.

Watching Twister in the backyard

When we woke up on Sunday, I opened the bedroom door (shut to preserve the air conditioning) to a smell like I’d never experienced before. It smelled like a moose had climbed three flights of stairs only to die in our hallway. The odor permeated every floor of the house.

I closed the door and went back to bed like a woman with the vapors. Val and Marne ventured to the backyard, where the tiniest tentacles of the smell had begun the night before. Flashlight in hand, Val rooted around under the crawlspace and discovered a decomposing squirrel. It felt like an omen, or maybe a metaphor, or maybe a giant fuck-you from a year that won’t let up. In bed, I began to call wildlife removal services, all of which were closed on Sundays, prohibitively expensive, or too far away. “This doesn’t happen at hotels,” I said, staring at the ceiling.

Val smeared vapor-rub under her nostrils like a coroner and crawled under the house to retrieve the squirrel. She bagged it and walked several blocks away to our old apartment building, where she disposed of it in the dumpster. She came back and filled every floor with shallow dishes of white vinegar and baking soda and coffee grounds. She showered. We drew a tarot card. An inverted eight of wands. A wreathed and naked woman upon a pangolin over a scattered pile of sticks, and a cosmic imperative to take a break. The smell faded.

We knew we needed to get into the mood for day three. Brunch, we agreed. I pulled together a bloody mary — homemade horseradish vodka, EPIC Pickles bloody mary mix from central Pennsylvania, pickled okra, cornichons, dilly beans, and a strip of bacon — and made a tomato salad with whipped feta. Marne made biscuits, and we ate until we were full. I took a long, hot nap in our sunroom and then went to the living room, where we watched Gourmet Makes videos from Bon Appétit. It was supposed to be outdoor movie night, but we couldn’t do it; we were exhausted. In bed, we watched Birds of Prey projected against the far wall. “I just want to watch women beating up some men,” Marne said, and I could not argue otherwise.

The setup was practically nothing: a cheap pool ordered from overseas, barely cool hose water, a postage-stamp-sized city backyard.

On Monday, we drew an eight of pentacles: an omen of plenty, represented by a baker and a trio of puffins and a tray of rolls for sharing. We prepped another batch of ice cream, this one my suggestion: roasted banana. While it churned, we took a moment to mourn our last day. Marne and Val were determined to get me into the pool. I hesitated — I couldn’t get my bad ankle wet — but eventually I slipped on my waterproof shower sock and crawled into the water with Marne, then Val, with Marne supporting me like a human chair.

I confess that I’d been skeptical of the pool. If lying in an adult-sized inflatable pool was as lovely as getting in an actual pool, everyone would do it, right? When I’d ordered it, I was reminded of my grandfather asking my 6-year-old self if I wanted to go in a “Cuban swimming pool” before dunking me into a large bucket of water.

And yet, it is astonishing what water can do. The setup was practically nothing: a cheap pool ordered from overseas, barely cool hose water, a postage-stamp-sized city backyard. But we were in our suits and slathered on sunscreen and it felt, for a few hours, like summer. Not the unique misery of 2020’s summer, but other summers with their normal excess and low stakes and abundance, their cheap flip-flops and pool afternoons and water ice and late sunsets.

We stayed there floating, laughing, talking, until the sun went. Dinner was Beyond Burgers — the best of the meatless proteins we’ve tried — with aged cheddar and caramelized onions and avocado and chipotle aioli on toasted buns. We polished them off and they were perfect; the sort of thing you wanted at the end of a summer day. Then we had a sundae bar: homemade hot fudge with bourbon, fried peanuts, homemade whipped cream, and large marshmallows toasted over the flame of our gas stove. This, all over the weekend’s two homemade ice creams; a perfectly decadent end.

Outside, it was dark. We flipped on the string lights and set up the projector and screen against the neighbor’s fence. Then, we watched Twister, a perfect summer drive-in-style film about human arrogance in the face of natural disaster. Oh, and the indescribable appeal of Helen Hunt. But mostly the human arrogance thing. Val slipped me popcorn; Marne sat near our feet. A few blocks away, a dead squirrel rotted in a dumpster. We enjoyed our pleasures even as we were trapped by a country that can’t get its act together. We ate and laughed and mourned our lost summer and laughed again. And what’s more American than that?

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Q7xXiB https://ift.tt/34bXKys

When leaving the house is impossible, cocktails, caftans, and karaoke are all the vacation you need

I did thousand-piece puzzles and re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read books and stared into space.

We decided to pull a new tarot card each morning.

It was Marne’s idea to pitch a staycation. It’s a hateable word, as overused and near-meaningless as “self-care.”

“Vacation-style eating” included lobster rolls with a side of hound.

The Death Card on day 1 signaled a time of transition.

Cheap flip flops and pool lounging (here, by Marne) are part of the normal summer excess.

We hardly noticed the strange smell that was developing in the backyard.

Marne made biscuits for Sunday brunch.

Watching Twister in the backyard

The setup was practically nothing: a cheap pool ordered from overseas, barely cool hose water, a postage-stamp-sized city backyard.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Q7xXiB via Blogger https://ift.tt/329dEqu

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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cakalakgeorge · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://www.milliup.com/the-hot-on-da-block-tour-2020/

The Hot On Da Block Tour 2020

We invite you to the “The Hot On Da Block Tour 2020” Co-Sponsored and Co-Hosted by MilliUp taking place January 31st in the THALIAN HALL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, INC 310 Chestnut Street, Wilmington, NC 28401

The Hot On Da Block Tour 2020 is a unique concert event that gives access to the general public, theater goers, press and professionals.

“Connect your brand & story with consumers in a unique, monumental, and invaluable way! We will deliver a unforgettable experience in “The Hot On The Block Tour 2020” in an amalgamation of student life and prospective consumers, local press, brands, organizations, and general public.

ARTIST ROSTER

Host- ANGELA HARRIS

BOTTOM BOY INC

FOUR TON

LADY B

BOSS MONEY

MAKZ

ROGUES P & SCOTTY MAC

DARIAN PELMAN

ONE TAKE AND BLACK MAMBA

BLACK BOTTLE BOY BLUE

KENISE TAYLOR

TY 704 & SAVO KASH

RAPPING GRANDPA

ITINERARY

Boys & Girls Club Jan 31 8am-11am Boys & Girls Club 4 Hours Volunteer

1) Motivational Moments Speak on Bullying, Positive Attitudes, Goal Setting, 1 person Tell Children Background Story and how they had a positive outcome

2) Team Builder

3) 2 Performances

4) Plaque Ceremony

Vendor Set Up Jan 31 1pm to 3pm

Meet & Greet Jan 31 3pm to 6pm

Showcase Jan 31 Doors Open 7pm

Showcase Starts Jan 31 Doors Open 7:30pm to 10:30pm

Food & Beverage Available

All Ages Show

HOT ON DA BLOCK WINTER CONCERT TREATMENT

MEDIA ASSETS HOLDINGS COMPANY ™

120 WALL ST. 18TH FL C/O NFTE

10005

Johnny Torres

Owner/Managing Partner

[email protected]

(Internal & External Communications)

TREATMENT

“HOT ON DA BLOCK WINTER CONCERT 2020™” INDEPENDENT ENTREPRENEURIAL FILM AND CONCERT SERIES

Created by: Johnny Torres

Executive Producer:

Directing Coordinator:______________________

Genre: Independent Entrepreneur Film / Reality Series/ Concert Series

Title: HOT ON DA BLOCK 2020™ Where we learn about brands and their contribution to the culture, tactics for survival and pursuit of the American dream opening conversation and contributing to solutions in controversial topic and issues. Narrated by various artists & hosted by special guests.

Logline (short pitch): “YO! MTV Raps” meets “AMERICA’S GOT TALENT” brands participation. Premiering the lives, milestones of the entrepreneurs. See these brands at work, entertaining live, prowling in their circles. At key moments in their stories the brands update the public with their stories and productions being created simultaneously.

Synopsis: “HOT ON DA BLOCK 2020™” fills the void of what people everywhere experience trying to be self made intertwining it with the most informative content ever released in a fun and exciting way. Also shows them contributing to social causes.

Get inside and learn what makes them tick. See them juggling the demands of markets and business building in entertainment in the search for success. Watch their assertive demeanor in the concert series and events..

“HOT ON DA BLOCK 2020™” documents, and follows brands, providing a fascinating social matrix that draws the viewer to bond with their stories.

Each segment of the film and concert series will have portions devoted to different segments of the brands around their vision, minds and motifs.

“HOT ON DA BLOCK 2020™” – Our castings and Meet and Greets selects individuals in high-visibility businesses such as film, entertainment, advertising, fashion, sales, marketing, law, and the media. Brands efforts will be highlighted to show the stresses, successes, and situations that they encounter…and most importantly how they deal with those experiences.

“Friendship” – The bonding rituals of the brands will be highlighted as the overriding context. Our cast will be a close-knit group of up and coming brands & recording artists. Scene will include the brands meeting for counseling to discuss latest life happenings and frank discussions of the growth of HipHop in a global market.

Sample episode arc-

Intro – A small montage is shown of each young brand to refresh the viewer about their background, , life, and current situation in the video series. This is quickly recapped as we watch the actors in scenes at work and socially, and ends with the actors meeting at a “HOT ON DA BLOCK WINTER CONCERT 2020™” EVENT, or shooting location.

Initial Highlights of advice, shooting tips, etc– Fascinating business advice tips etc recaps from previous days, or recordings, interesting gripes about the workday and/or family, emotional moments among the actors, all of these highlights are shown in 2-3 minute clips per segment/issue/moment.

Health Focus #1 – Recap a current actors drug free, health life and splice it with commentary from one or more of the actors at a gym. Show the actors out on a workout or getting healthy at a gym.

Career Focus – Next the video series will move to one of the interviewing guests (professionals). The preparation, anxiety, delivery, resolution, and reaction to one of the actors location and where it is going to be filmed. Use shots of the location, the other young brands dancing and enjoying the interview and performance, and the actor discussing it happy after the circumstances.

“HOT ON DA BLOCK 2020™” Committee & Cast – participates asking the young brands questions before they interview and shadow professionals.

Friend Focus # 2 – The young brands gather together to discuss how the interviews and shadowing went, what were the results of the interviews and shadowing and a production.

recap – At this point the film segways into a show reinforcing the young brands bonding between them and their advertisers, sponsors, mentors with shots of them together. Clips from filming that fill in the gaps of the creative and production process of their brand and product and career focuses are shown. The advice, reassurance, and support between the mentors and young brands are highlighted. Any additional outlandish or hilarious stories are played out.

Discuss! – Give the viewer a website link to view and comment on the Film project, Concert ad Video series. Switch the series to a viewing party at a local Middle, School, University, Theater spot where we see the audience’s reaction to the video series. Close by flashing the website again and an opportunity for the young brands to post a video of their friends and be the next set of “HOT ON DA BLOCK 2020™”.

HOT ON DA BLOCK™ WINTER CONCERT 2020 BIOGRAPHIES

+HOT ON DA BLOCK™ WINTER CONCERT 2020

January 31st 2020

The Hot On Da Block™ Winter Concert is a fast growing hiphop production exhibiting a mixture of live performers and entertainers performing a unique colorful vibe to the musical landscape .

(Scene 1)

HOLLYWOOD ANGELA HARRIS

BIOGRAPHY

Angela Harris, also known as “Hollywood Angel,” is a purpose journalist and native of Panama City, FL. She was born with a knack for God, people, education and entertainment!

Angela earned a Bachelors of Science Degree in Broadcast Journalism from Florida A&M University, one of the top HBCU’s in the US. Home to the Rattlers and the Marching 100’s Band, in the heart of the Capital City!

Hollywood Angel earned her 2nd B.S. Degree in Film from Full Sail University, one of the finest Art schools in the country, located in Winter Park, FL. She has hopes of becoming an Entertainment Lawyer in the near future and currently manages artist, Knolo Stacks of Block Ink Ent, is a PR for IUU MUSIC Hong Kong has conducted A&R and PR work for many in the industry including Que Mussolini, 4G Rap Music, Charisma Mufasa, Swift Slay, Black Ice, Kenyon Glover, Donnell Williams, Jamil Flores, Geechie Dan, Polo the Fur King, Shi Lewis, Jermel Howard and so many more!

Angela has experience as an Opinions Editor, Assistant Editor, and Contributing Writer. She has director credits from creating her own movies and commercials, she is skilled in photography, public relations and social media management.

Some of her work includes: Journey Magazine, OZONE Magazine as a featured Model, Miami Kustoms Magazine, Flaim Magazine, BTMB Magazine, the FAMUAN and Capital Outlook newspaper. She has worked on music videos with Boyz 2 Men, Nino Brown, Blood Raw, Rapp Brown, Percy Townes, Swift Slay and BBMG. She directed: “Acquaintances, My Friend, Whatever,” a short story on stereotypes of African Americans, an HIV/AIDS awareness PSA which was submitted to a national contest for Global Aids Awareness, and she had the opportunity to submit a test Doritos commercial for the Super Bowl through Full Sail University. Angela has been in front of the camera on many occasions as well as BTS. One of the 1st movies Angela played a role in is, “Chain Reaction,” featuring Rick Ross in character, directed by MBezzy and filmed by Total Kaos! She is also featured in “Forgive Us Our Sin,” by Antoine Gomire, a Chicago Filmmaker and has been cast for “Forgive Us Our Sins II.” Angela is also committed to starring in her 1st feature length film, “Just a Closer Walk,” by John Fredericks, where she will play a role as John’s mother’s best friend!

Angela loves the beach, sunny weather and seafood. She enjoys spending time with family. And she is extremely excited to be the new Editor-in-Chief for BDL4LIFE Magazine and a current A&R for BDL4LIFE ENT!

“To all of our current supporters, thanks for embracing me with open arms and entrusting me to take BDL4LIFE Magazine to another level! And to all of our future clients, we welcome you with open arms and are extremely happy to bring our supporters a wide array of features, marketing, advertising and promotional opportunities!” Let’s work 2018!!

To Contact Email: [email protected]

IG: bdl4lifemagazine

Facebook: BDL4LIFE MAGAZINE

Website: BDL4LIFEMAGAZINE.BLOGSPOT.COM

(Scene 2)

LIK BROTHAZ

BIOGRAPHY

Praised by music fans The LIK BROTHAZ are “captivating”. Performances draw from their notable “style of intellect, message and emotions,”

The LIK BROTHAZ are currently recording their debut album, INFLUENCE, featuring new works and will be released in 2020.

Through their engaging and thought-provoking songs, branded by listeners as genuinely exciting” and “imaginative,” the LIK BROTHAZ Ty Boogie and Diddy Bop acclaim for bringing “young emotional power” to bold new sounds, and for their “fun masterpiece” performances- The group will tour extensively across North America giving both debut appearances at Thalian Hall Wilmington NC January 31st as part of a concert series.

Based in Kentucky, the LIK BROTHAZ have been presenting themselves in schools and sporting events throughout the 2019 season, leading the public to applaud them as “a new generation of icons, who cogently traverse a range of repertoire staples and entertain.

Previous recorded music video engagements include: the 2019 Southern Elementary & UK a rendition to the University of Kentucky..

The Duo is getting booked solid to perform extensively throughout North America, and abroad.

Formed in 2019 and combining 2 distinctive musical personalities into a unique collective, the LIK BROTHAZ draw their name from “LIKE BROTHERS,” noted for their respect and love for each other and others with incredible detail.

(Scene 3)

Supa Cool

BIOGRAPHY

Anthony Walker better known as RealSupaCool, was born on Novemeber 14th 1985 in Germany. After moving back to the United States, he began his journey to discover his gift of music. Elementary school was tough not because of the work but because of anger issues due to divorce from mom and dad. From there he found his calm thru the music he listened to and used that energy to channel what would become greatness.

RealSupaCool got his official start in middle school where a good friend named Matt told him about the program Fruityloops (FL Studio, which was at version 1.9 at the time). It allowed hia vision to be produced in beat format using the software he just gained. Soon talent shows and other artists began to discover him as not only an artist but an extraordinary producer as well.

His past influences are artists like (2Pac, Biggie, T.I., Jeezy, Outkast) and producers like (Dr. Dre, Mannie Fresh, DJ Toomp, Organized Noize) just to name a few. He has been making quality tracks for over 20 years now and has worked with many people in the industry (Kevin Gates, Bezz Believe, Shaq, Starlito, Gucci Mane, Bubba Sparxxx, Jackboy 1800, OG Boobie Black).

What the future looks like is simply a mission to the top of every chart that can be made in music. Currently he is a member of Chessboard Enterprises and is a minority shareholder as well. “My job is to make sure we experience the levels that I’ve already seen in this industry. This time we do it on our terms as a family like we supposed to.”

(Scene 4)

BOTTOM BOY INC.

BIOGRAPHY

Bottom Boy Inc hailed by fans for their hardcore energy is equally on a world-music stage or performing a concert. The Bottom Boy Inc. come together when CEO Johnny Fabian seeks out talent as T.A., BBI Bray, Young God, and Bobaine. and begin successful partnerships from their love for the music— which features a seamless blend of traditional hiphop and crunk music—leading to a busy global touring schedule and a growing catalog of critically acclaimed recordings garnering notoriety.

Committed to performing their debut GET DOWN OR LAY DOWN album music premieres MY DOG , SLIDE, STEPPED ON along with their best compositions.

BBI The Bottom Boy Inc become connected the concert series striving actively and expanding their repertoire, with contributing works to be announced. . Appearing frequently in diverse non-traditional spaces, night clubs and art galleries the groups forms an unforgettable experience.

(Scene 5)

LADY BLING

BIOGRAPHY

LADY BLING is one of the best recording artists to descend from Memphis, Tennessee.

“Nothing short of remarkable…Lady Bling simply, brings whatever she narrates over to glorious life. That is how music fans describe her. Whether rapping about hustling, struggles, or telling a story her diverse repertoire captivates audiences and critics with her gritty yet charming stage presence, and entertaining presentation.

Lady Bling‘s renowned SLAUGHTER TIME 2 ALBUM offers a unique combination of a pure voice and seamless blend of songs and artists ensembled.

(Scene 6)

Mr. Smith a.k.a BO$$ MONEY

BIOGRAPHY

Meet Mr. Smith a.k.a. “BO$$ Money” — many have been impatiently waiting.

Performing “Do Your Thang” his promise into a persuasive message that resonates an adult and mature melody creating attention. In this event, BO$$ Money through fly sex appeal and setting a trend BO$$ Money is reaching audiences elevating excitement and a memorable show.

Applauded by fans a perfect encapsulation of today’s genre-bending trend in Twerk music,” and by like-minded,” BOSS MONEYs interpretation of Do Your Thang! makes him one of the most dynamic artists of the culture and generation.

(Scene 7)ROGUES P DRR

BIOGRAPHY

The DARK REIGN ROYALTY camp has earned praise from audiences and critics alike for their show performances, compelling recordings and distinctive repertoire. Hailed as “…a tight-knit explosive with power and un-concealable ambition to connect with their newly found listeners”.

DRRs connection with its audiences repertoire is diverse, ranging from songs by ROGUES P and SCOTTY MAC such as Your Desire featuring New York’s own pride. DRRs subsequent performances has gained praise culminating with performances as part of the concert series.

DRR is based in Long Island NY.

(Scene 8)STATEN STARS

BIOGRAPHY

(Scene 9)GEE GEE

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(Scene 10)

Living Darian

BIOGRAPHY

Cincinnati, Ohio born Darian has led a challenging life resulting in ultimate victory. His birth father, onetime James Brown guitarist Calvin Goshade, returned to touring during his mother’s pregnancy and had no idea he had a son and his mother, Shelia Faye Owen, attempted raising him and his two sisters before cancer felled her ten days before Darian’s fifth birthday. Owen had chosen individuals to care for her children upon her death but sexual abuse soon fragmented the grieving children – Darian’s sisters were adopted and Darian moved thirteen times over the next three years before William and Marilyn Pellman adopted him.

Perhaps it seems natural, given his DNA, that Darian found music soon after. He started playing drums at the age of ten, began composing his own music by his fourteenth birthday, and had his own studio at the tender age of eighteen years old. He logged seven years as a member and executive producer of the band Non-Fiction but differences eventually dissolved the unit and Darian has worked as a solo artist since then. His album release Live For Love illustrates a vast array of influences – much of his material draws from hip hop, but blues and rock alike make their presence felt as well. His multi-instrumental talents fuel the sprawling eighteen song collection and his production work shaping the release distinguishes its sound.

The opener “Hit the Highway” melds his rock influences with a high velocity hip hop styled delivery. There’s a light synthesizer touch adding color to the track at key points, phased guitar riffing, and simmering energy keeping the track on a headlong path from its first seconds to last. This is a strong way to begin the album and the variation Darian brings to his vocal delivery further sets the song apart from similar efforts. The album’s title song opens with pensive and lyrical piano before expanding into a mid-tempo hip hop groove. It features second vocalist Jangles as a featured guest and his voice provides a low-key dramatic contrast with Darian’s own. Darian intends this song to stand as a definitive personal statement about his own destiny and what he wants from his world; the mix of attitude and musicality provides a perfect forum for such aspirations.

“These Things” is another mix of stylistic approaches opening with a blast of soul before incorporating his hip hop sound into the composition. It is impossible to not be impressed by the seamless way he blends seemingly disparate musical strands into an unified whole; other artists can’t pull such a synthesis off without it sounding disjointed and poorly conceived. “Down by the River” has a light funk edge and a moody near singer/songwriter sensibility unlike anything else discussed thus far in this review. The performance dispenses with the hip hop influences prevalent throughout much of the album in favor of a stripped down musical attack built around Darian’s voice and guitar.

“Gullible” has a slinky groove snaking its way over the course of three and a half minutes Darian matches with an understated vocal throughout. It is one of the release’s hidden gems and should be compelling in a live setting. The album concludes with a reprise of the title track sans Jangles’ vocal contributions – this take on the track varies little from the previous version but the additional emphasis on Darian’s performance gives it a greater personal quality than ever before. Living Darian’s latest release Live for Love is the peak so far in a short career, but he’s accomplished more as an artist than many of his contemporaries manage over decades. It is bracing to think about how early he is in his journey.

(Scene 11)

JOHN FOUR TON

BIOGRAPHY

(Scene 12)

RPG a.k.a. Rapping GrandPa

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#Hollywood Angel #Angela Harris #Bottom Boy Inc #Custom written articles #DArian Pelman #Gee Gee and the lik brothaz #Justin Case #Lady B #MilliUp #MilliUp!dotcom!#Rogues P #The Hot On Da Block Tour 2020 #Articles

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michaelmikkelson · 6 years

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iHeartMedia: How to Make Sense of All Your Data & What to Do with It

You have a lot of data sources, but piecing them together to get the insights you need to inform your strategy is a complicated, laborious, and convoluted task.

We were thrilled to host Hetal Patel, Vice President of Consumer and Corporate Insights at iHeartMedia, to discuss data sources and learnings at this year’s Customer Love Summit. In her talk, Hetal shares how she makes sense of complex data streams and how to use your findings to have a positive impact on the business.

Specifically, Hetal’s talk covers:

Five buckets of data organization most companies use

The “Three P’s” of approaching problems through leveraging data

How to use storytelling to help data support your big picture

And so much more!

youtube

If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Good evening, everybody. I’m very well aware of the fact that I’m the last thing standing between you and the happy hour, so I’m gonna try and keep this as short, fun, and interesting as much as I can. I’ll take a minute to introduce myself and my role just to kinda put in context what I’m gonna be talking to you guys about today. So I’m Hetal, and I lead the consumer and corporate insights practice at iHeartMedia.

For those of you who are not familiar with iHeartMedia, we essentially are…our assets set within four big buckets. We own about 850 radio stations across the U.S. We have our iHeartRadio app, which has about 100 million registered users. We do about 20,000 events locally and nationally, some big tentpole events that you see on TV, like iHeartRadio Music Awards, iHeartRadio Music Festival, or some smaller local events as well.

And last but not least, we also own Clear Channel Outdoor, which is a lot of billboards that you see around, right? So we basically play in buckets like broadcast radio, digital radio, events, you know, sponsorship, and last but not least, location data from outdoor and billboard. So as you can imagine, the problem I deal with is slightly different. I have way too much data on my hands, and that’s a good problem to have, nevertheless challenging.

It’s challenging from the standpoint of, how do you, A, connect the dots across all different buckets? And when I say different the standpoint of…traditional radio is 100-year-old medium. So imagine the measurement that came with something that was invented before internet existed. And that to be coupled with a digital medium like radio, which…with digital radio, where everything is available based on data. So you have a client and you’re trying to sell this thing which was 100 years old, where I can say, “I can only deliver X and Y. And there’s this new shiny tool that can give you 100 million things, but it’s the target is this small.”

So constantly what I’m faced with, and going back to my role is my alternate title is a chief storyteller. What I have to do is come up with, in a big picture and a big scale from the corporate standpoint, a story of who we are and how do we sit in the marketplace currently versus our competitors in the radio space? Are we a radio company? Are we an audio company, and how do I use and fuel data to tell my story?

And so what you’re gonna notice in terms of the stories that I’m about to share with you today, they might be a little bit too…I’ve tried to make them as specific as possible so you guys understand how data is fueling those decisions or those stories. But sometimes it might be too big picture. So with further ado, I’m gonna start with this.

So, you know, there is a lot of data, like I mentioned. And everyone, you know, because of the fact that data is everywhere; everything has to be data focused. Everything has to be data driven, data first. And so it’s a good place to be in because I think we have the seat at the table. But at the same time, as people in the organization understand the importance of data and want to rely more and more on data, they don’t necessarily know what to do with that data. They want data. They’ll say, “I need data,” but that’s about the question, that is, I need a story. But what kind of data? Who are you talking to? Why do you need this data?

So I know every organization kinda, you know, organizes your hierarchy slightly differently. In terms of data in our organization sits in these five big buckets. So the way we organize this is we have consumer insights, second is analytics, first party as well as third party, third is social data, fourth is bunch of syndicated data, all the way from Scarborough, MRI, comScore, you know, all the tools out there. And last but not least, big data.

So these are the five buckets or key functions in which the current research structures it. And given that there is all this intelligence around our broadcast users, app users, you know, people who come to our events, how do you navigate all this data has been a challenge. I’ve been at iHeart for about five years and I’m still continuing to, you know, figure this out. And as they introduced me saying I’m gonna help you make sense of data, I can’t make any promises. I’m still…it’s a work in progress.

So this has been my mantra in terms of approaching this problem, and I call it the three Ps of data. The first one is product. The first year, year and a half that I spent here was starting to get together, what are all the pieces of data I have? Where does it all sit? How can it all come together? So one is getting all your data in one place.

The second was process, and this took a little bit of self-teaching because this came at the knowledge, or, like, epiphany that made me realize that I have to not let perfect get in the way of good. There is so much changing in the data world right now that if you sit and wait for the perfect solution we’re never gonna make it. We’re just gonna sit in that one spot. So it was extremely crucial for me to realize that I may not have the solution, the perfect solution that I’m looking for, but I have to embrace what I’ve got, and move along, and chug along.

And thirdly, people. I’ve had to hire people for jobs who nobody went to school for, you know? Two years ago, or three years ago when they started to launch the first music awards my CEO said, “We’re gonna do social awarding.” And I had no idea about, except for having a Facebook account for myself and a Twitter account for myself, I had no idea how to measure social. I didn’t study that, I didn’t have an education in that. I had to go figure out how to do that.

But what I realized was that you can’t really hire for skills. You have to hire for passion. You have to hire for attitude. And I’ve had people who’ve gone and figured stuff out. Because what I knew three years ago is something that I’m not using today. And so these are the three fundamental units which kinda have helped me get to the point of making sense of this data.

So having set the context with that I’m gonna take a few specific examples and case studies to talk to you guys about how I’ve taken few data pieces across the different five functions that I spoke to you about and actually made a business decision or impacted a business decision. So one of the ways…so still continuing in the social media space, right? We have a very interesting relationship, being a radio company, with the artists.

So, you know, the artists that…think about the first time…before the Spotify world. Think about the first time you heard about an artist, or you got to know about Taylor Swift, or you got to know about a new artist. You hear a song over and over for a few number of times on the radio and then you go, “Yeah, that sounds familiar.” So that’s how artists kinda get popular. The less known artists slowly, slowly start to…the promotional power of radio gets them to known and being familiar. And so we have this really interesting relationship with artists, and so we’ve started to leverage that relationship and take it from the traditional radio world onto the social media and digital world. And I’ll explain that in a little bit.

The second engagement that I’m gonna touch upon was actually a very, very interesting activation that we’ve done in the social media space. This is to do with the iHeartRadio Music Awards where we were the first awards to say, “Let’s have people vote on the different nominees and decide the winners, instead of people sitting in a room and casting a vote on who should be the best pop song of the year, who should be the best collaboration of the year.” And so we took voting on different categories and nominees onto the social media space.

And thirdly, tailor strategies to different mediums. There are so many newer mediums, like five years ago, I’m not on Snapchat, right? So there are newer, newer social media. It’s not enough to know Facebook, not enough to know Twitter. While there are the bigger ones you’ll start to see there are younger, and smaller, and newer platforms. So it’s constantly you have to evolve yourself to be there where your audiences are. So I’m gonna quickly skip a few.

Okay, so with respect to the first one, so what we came up with was we took a bunch of social listening data from syndicated tools to understand that our engagement on Tuesdays was the lowest of all weekdays. And so we were trying to increase our engagement on Tuesdays on certain networks. In this particular case it was Twitter.

So what we came up with was…so this was based on a data point that was noticed when we were doing some kind of analytics to understand, you know, patterns across different social networks. And we came up with what was called, and I don’t know if you guys have ever seen this on Twitter, but it’s the iHeartRadioTwitterTuesday. What we do is different artists, on Tuesday for 30 minutes, will take over our Twitter, iHeartRadio’s official account, and you’re able to Tweet your questions to that particular artist, and then that artist writes back to you. So that’s a two-way communication between a fan and an artist.

So you remember back in the days you could call into the radio and talk to the person. So we took that traditional radio interaction, two-way communication and put it on the social media space. What was fantastic about this was there the fan would call the radio station, talk to the artist, and back. It was a two-way communication. We took that two-way communication, put it on the social media space, and so now what happened is if a Ryan Seacrest is writing back to a fan all the other followers of a fan and Ryan Seacrest’s fan are able to write back on that chain. So from a two-way dialogue we went onto what’s called the omnilogue.

We created these conversations between different people that were not even a part of the original conversation. And so that’s a much deeper level of engagement that the social media was able to bring to the table, versus what we were doing earlier. So that’s just an example of that.

Similar to that, we are, again, in the vein of, you know, redefining our relationship with artists, we are coming up with creative and different ways of how we can help artists launch their new albums, singles. And with Shawn Mendes we did exclusive release of his single. And this example was a full-day takeover for Snapchat because he resonates better with younger audiences. Data shows us that 80% of our Snapchat audience, so iHeartRadio is on Snapchat Discover, that’s the place for brands on Snapchat. And 80% of our audience in the Snapchat discover is between the ages of 12 and 17.

And so based on that data point and what Shawn Mendes’ manager wanted to resonate with in terms of a target audience, we recommended that partnership for him to take over our Snapchat channel for the day and do an exclusive release of his new single. So that’s where you’ll see that. And Elvis Duran improved that.

And so now moving onto the second piece of actually fueling social voting for an awards show. We came up with the strategy to say, you know, everybody was talking about influencer marketing in the social media space. And we say, you know, people hire influencers to talk about your brand to, you know, further evangelize your brand. We said, “Why don’t we start…” There were five fan voted armies that were created looking at different cohorts within the social media space, looking at the number of engagements, how people, you know, what artist are they related with, or are they actually fans of? And we created ambassadors who then acted as further fueling.

So to give you an example, I’m gonna do a better job at this, one second. So Arianators, right? So that’s Ariana Grande’s fanbase on Twitter. The name that we came up with was Arianators. What that does was is there was a group of 8 to 10 girls and boys that were fans of Ariana Grande, and they Tweeted and re-Tweeted and created this engagement of voting, ramping up things like, “Oh, this is the last day to vote. Let’s get her on there. I want her to win.” And so we created a fan ambassador for each of the five artists that were nominated, and they were almost pitting against each other to create that level of voting and engagement for their own artists.

And all those five brand ambassadors were then invited to the award show, and then we were measuring the voting at the backend. So through a social media listening tool we were able to count the number of votes based on the dedicated hashtag that they use to vote, and then they were given an award for the most amount of votes that were created for that artist during that show by the artist. So this was an example of actually taking your influencers from your own fanbase, from your own fans and followers on the iHeartRadio page, versus finding a new paid influencer to do this kind of push for you in the social media space.

And then to go back, this actually happened because this was rooted in the idea of a piece of work that I had done earlier in the year, which was a primary research study, a consumer insight study where we did some generational word for Gen Zs, millennials, so on and so forth. And one striking thing that I’ve actually heard in a couple of talks this morning, too, in Mike’s keynote this morning saying, you know, “Not only build for your consumer but build with your consumer.”

And so what you see about Gen Zs and millennials is that they love to co-create. They don’t wanna be recipients of culture, they wanna be culture creators. They want a voice at the table. They wanna be part of the strategy that you’re crafting for them. And so you’ll see that for Gen Z and millennials, they wanted to be a part of the process. And in taking this insight we actually came up with the idea of doing the fan ambassador for awards. That’s just talking about the best fan army and that’s how it was created. So it was Beliebers, Directioners, and Harmonizers, those were the three that were created. And you’ll see those were the ambassadors that were selected. So they would go on Twitter, they would ask their fans and followers to go and ramp up their voting.

And last but not least, you’ll see, like I was mentioning, there are new and emerging platforms. So in your social strategy be mindful of including the new and emerging platforms and don’t focus all your energies on Twitter and Facebook. And the reason these three strategies worked is because there was a core defining consumer insights that defined each of those. And in the first one there’s a core need of connection between fans and an artist, and we took that and we created a dialogue to an omnilogue.

The second one around fan ambassadors were the younger generations, like Gen Zs and millennials. They like to be influenced but they also wanna be influencers themselves. And in terms of the more emergent platforms, they have an expectation to be live and relevant. If you continue to keep pushing your content out on just Facebook, very quickly you’re gonna start losing younger audiences because they’re starting to associate that with older audiences. And so that was one example of how consumer insights focused few initiatives within the business, especially in the social space.

The second one that I’m gonna quickly talk through is how we are starting to take our digital and broadcast data and starting to merge the two. So like I was saying, radio is a 100-year-old medium, and digital radio has enough data. However, their targeting, or the size, is much smaller compared to radio. Radio reaches 93% of America in a given week, right? So it has huge scale.

And so what we started to do…but it has its restrictions given it’s an old medium, so you have to still rely on Nielsen, and the meters to give you any sort of measurement. What we were able to do is a form of lookalike modeling. We took a bunch of people from our digital 100-million users. We mapped their listening habits onto the broadcast radio listening habits, and created these cohorts. Because digital has changed the way…I’ll jump one more to talk about this.

Because digital has changed the way people are buying media now. Even for traditional mediums now, buying is based on cohorts and kinds of audiences, different types of audiences. So for those of you who are familiar with media, usually radio or television gets bought on, “I want 18 to 34, prime time, a.m. drive and p.m. drive.” But those days are gone. Now you want someone who is an auto intender who’s planning to buy a car in the next six months.

So to be able to give that level of granularity of data to radio or broadcast radio, how do you go about that? So we came up with a lookalike modeling based on our digital data because we are able to look at our 100-million users and map them back to our on-air listeners based on demographics and certain other criterias, we were able to create cohorts which can then be served up from a programmatic standpoint. And then they can also be optimized in real time. We are doing this for the industry. iHeartMedia is doing that and other players are starting to embrace that as well.

So my last parting words for you guys are gonna be, and I’ll give the credit for this to Jonathan Mildenhall, who used to be the ex-CMO of Airbnb. He said, “Don’t let your strategy be data driven, because when you keep your strategy data driven you leave no room for surprises. What consumers want is delight. What consumers want is surprise, so let it be data inspired. Use your data. Use your data but leave a little room for surprise in there.”

So that’s all I’m gonna leave you guys at. Any questions? Thank you.

The post iHeartMedia: How to Make Sense of All Your Data & What to Do with It appeared first on Apptentive.

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adambstingus · 6 years

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You May Be A Good Dude, But Here’s Why You’re Single

I used to be a “Nice Girl” — a former walking Taylor Swift song in geeky glasses who’d stare longingly through your bedroom window while singing about how terrible your girlfriend is. I used to make homemade fudge for all the cute boys in the hope they’d notice me. Now, I write romance novels. And when I published a book about ghosts and serial killers, the creepy stalker guy was the one who attracted weirdly devoted fan girls.

The point is, I know where nice guys are coming from. I’ve cringed while watching them unknowingly sabotage their relationships. I’ve winced through stories from my female friends of how nice guys became creepy. I’ve watched good guys like you chase away nice girls who really did once want to give them a chance. So if you don’t understand how your sweetness and good intentions could possibly scare anyone away, buckle up, because I’m about to give you some inside info on where you’re going wrong.

The Big Sickly Sweet Romantic Gesture

Here’s a fun game. Sit down with a bunch of girls and ask them to make a list of the sweetest, most romantic things a guy they like has ever done for them. Then ask them to make a list of the creepiest, scariest, most WTF things a guy they didn’t like had ever done to try to get their attention. Then count how many of the exact same things are on both lists.

Sappy poetry, sketches, drawings, acoustic ballads, mix tapes — sweet, personalized, homemade gestures are the unstable land mines of romantic weapons. Get it right and you’ll demolish the competition, shake the ground, and blow away … um … whatever gets exploded when two people suddenly decide they really like each other.

Get it wrong and you’ve just shot Cupid’s dick clean off.

pixdeluxe/iStock “I made a sand castle based on floor plans from your childhood home.”

Hey, this former fudge-making girl gets the appeal of sweet sappy gestures. I’ve written poetry for guys I liked. I’ve made mixtapes and playlists. Hell, I’ve even sewn things for guys. And I’ve included all kinds of grand romantic gestures in books I’ve written. The entertainment industry has been living off the sweet romantic gesture long before lovestruck 90s kids held boomboxes over their heads. When it comes to love, we’re trained to think bigger is better.

In movies, it doesn’t even matter how jerky your gesture is. In the grand cheerleading epic Bring It On, cute-guy-who-recently-did-an-NCIS-cameo (Jesse Bradford) shows up at head cheerleader Kirsten Dunst’s house with a cassette tape of a song he wrote for her. The song starts off with him insulting the most important thing in her life, before telling her he wants to feed her chocolates and screw her in a barn. Because it’s a movie, she starts dancing on her bed in her pajamas and spanking herself with her pompoms.

Universal Pictures This is not love.

In real life, there are just so many ways to get it wrong.

First off, it has to be really good. Bad amateur poetry and crappy artwork is just sad. Beyond that, there’s no faster way to look creepy than to come on way too strong … which makes music especially dangerous because there aren’t that many songs with lyrics like, “Hey, I think you’re kind of cute and I’d like to maybe go out sometime, if that’s cool with you.”

That aside, you’ve both got to be on the exact same page for it to work. If you take her out to dinner and she hates the food, you can both laugh it off and move on. But if you spend hours writing her a song, composing a poem, or organizing a flash mob to do a choreographed dance, she has to really love it. Like a lot. Because if she’s just “meh” about it, there’s no going back from that. You’ve just crammed any hope of a relationship into your ass and fart-launched it into the sun.

Because your sickly, sweet, romantic art is your goddamn heart spilled out on paper. It’s throwing the biggest weapon you’ll ever have — and that’s an incredibly big, risky, and frankly stupid thing to do. Whether she likes it or not, you’ve just put her on the spot. It’s often embarrassing and uncomfortable … and why would you want to embarrass someone you like? That doesn’t get fun until marriage.

Martin Dimitrov/iStock “That doesn’t even look like me. Terrible.”

You want to try a real-life sickly sweet romantic gesture on a real human girl? Start small. Nothing big. Nothing intense. Nothing pledging undying love. Don’t blow your romantic wad on someone you haven’t actually dated yet (or worse: is in a relationship with someone else). Because that’s just awkward and uncomfortable for everyone.

The Freaking Generous Grand Gesture

A friend of mine had been dating Mr. Nice Guy for about a week when she made an offhand joke about needing a massage. To her shock, he showed up for their next date with a gift-wrapped exotic personal massager. I know a guy who paid a girl’s credit card bills before he’d taken her on a first date. I know another who decided a weeklong trip together at Disney World would be the perfect way to start a brand-new relationship — and he lives in Canada.

Nice people kick ass at grand gestures. But every single one of those relationships I mentioned ended up crashing and burning in a big ball of flames and humiliation. Because here’s the thing: Grand gestures — especially financial ones — are very uncomfortable and even just plain crazy to people who aren’t used to it.

Money makes people weird. It just does. Especially when everyone else shows up to a birthday party thinking a “hey” is all the occasion requires, and you walk in with a gift-wrapped Xbox.

Don’t you hate being around the kind of asshole who’s always showing off that he has more money than you? How about the slimy turd who’s always paying the bill but leaves you feeling like he’s running some creepy agenda? Those guys are movie punchlines, villains, or Richard Gere. Don’t start off a relationship looking like a bag of money who’s saving the prostitute.

The gut reaction to this is: “I’ve spent a lifetime being told I should pay for dates and now you’re telling me that women hate men who pay for things? So, basically I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t?”

No, I’m saying your big, grand gestures might be self-sabotaging. You want to pick up the check? Then try asking the object of your affection if they’re cool with it. Or “Hey, I was thinking of booking something really fancy for our first date. Is that cool with you, or would you rather do something low key?” Remember, there are two of you in this thing. You’ve got to think about what’s not going to make it uncomfortable for her.

If your intention is to impress her with a fancy night out, and she’s on board with that idea, it’s going to be awesome. If your intention is to make her feel like she owes you something in return, you’re not actually a nice guy — you’re just a piece of shit.

Showering Them With Time And Attention, All The Time … Non Stop

One of the worst things I ever did, back in my nice girl, Taylor Swift stage was try to charm my way into a hot guy’s heart by giving him a personalized version of that stalker classic song where the guy pledges to watch his beloved constantly, every step she takes, every move she makes, because she belongs to him. It failed. Oh, how it failed.

For most women, nothing is creepier than a guy who smothers her by wanting to be around her, all the time. Which is really bad news for nice guys, because wanting exactly that is in their nature. They click “like” on all of her social media posts. They offer to help her with work, hobbies, homework. They show up when she gets off work to give her a ride. Being everywhere she is, all the time, forever, quickly goes from “He seems sweet” to “Ugh! Leave me alone for two goddamn minutes” to “I’m calling the police.”

I know a chick who freaked out at a guy for liking all of her posts, on all of her social media accounts, the second she posted them (He’d set up a bunch of alerts). I know another girl who ran screaming from a nice guy when it became clear he changed his bus schedule in order to sit near her every day. Basically any time you find yourself arguing with someone you barely know about why she doesn’t text you more often, you can presume the little voice in her head is chanting, “Run, run, run, RUN!”

Seems harsh? Well, from a woman’s perspective there are way more creepy, controlling, possessive, asshole stalker dudes in the world than there are nice guys. How’s she supposed to know you’re not one of them? It’s important to know that this isn’t your fault … but if you overcorrect by being around nonstop to show her how much of a normal guy you are, you’re just cranking the volume on her stalker alarm.

The “I’m Just Trying To Protect You” Thing

The world is full of assholes and creeps, and from the perspective of nice guys, too many hot and interesting women gravitate toward them. If only the evildoers among us were unmasked and the pretty girl at the next desk really saw just how bad that guy is, she’d fall right into your arms. Or at the very least, you’d be saving her a world of hurt.

Look, I get it. It’s noble to want to rescue people. There’s a whole subgenre of angsty music dedicated to helping girls see that their boyfriend’s a dick and a douchebag, and you can’t believe she’s really going out with him because he doesn’t know anything about her because he isn’t what a prince and lover ought to be. Which can be very sweet and very caring. Sometimes. But honestly? It can also be patronizing as hell and extremely annoying, because basically what you’re saying to a fellow grown-ass human being is that you know better than her and she’s not smart enough to know what she’s gotten herself into. You’re telling her that by going out with that guy, she’s being duped. You might as well be shouting directly into her face, “Wake up, you fucking idiot!”

It comes in lots of forms: “Here’s all the dirt on the guy you’re dating. Here’s why he’s no good for you. If you were my girl, you’d be treated like a queen,” or “Please don’t do this thing I don’t like because it’s bad for you, and I want you to be healthy and happy,” or “Please don’t ruin yourself by screwing that guy, or getting that tattoo, or going to that college, or whatever.” All of that boils down to, “Hey girl! I know what you need better than you do!”

Whether you like it or not, she’s got a reason for doing whatever she’s doing. Sure, you can offer to weigh in as a friend. But be prepared that she might not want to hear your opinion and it’s likely to piss her off.

Her body, heart, future, and mind are her business. Those things belong to her. Not you. Forgetting that, or acting like she doesn’t make good decisions, or nagging her about her life after she’s told you to drop it, will make you look like an asshole and fast.

You care. You’re nice. But as much as you’re going to hate hearing this: Sometimes, being too nice really is the problem. And that brings me to the point that is going to sound like an alien language to nice guys …

You Avoid Confrontation At All Costs

Nice people don’t like fighting. They don’t like hurting people, so they don’t risk confrontation. Because of that, they often don’t say what they mean. They also don’t like rejection, so instead of just coming out and saying they’re interested in a person, they drop hints. Then they get frustrated and hurt when that person doesn’t catch on. Unfortunately, that all adds up to make you look like a petrified little kid.

If nice people are lucky enough to get into a relationship, they’ll do just about anything to keep it … which often means avoiding arguments. They won’t bring up what’s bothering them, especially if the source of that hurt (even unintentionally) is their significant other. Instead they hide it, ignore it, or sugar coat it for a REALLY long time, until they finally hit a breaking point, and it shoots out of their word hole like emotional projectile vomit. What should have been a simple, honest conversation turns into a huge blow-out argument.

Don’t do that.

Conflict and confrontation are a major part of relationships. You can’t ask her out if you can’t confront her. You can’t fix a fractured relationship if you don’t talk about the conflict. The important part is remembering that there’s a difference between “I’d like to talk about something that’s been bothering me” and “You’ve been a fucking bitch lately, and now it’s throw-down time!”

It’s terrifying — god knows I get that — but it’s necessary. You want to show a grand gesture of your love and commitment? This is the best way to do it. If the relationship has problems, talking about it (and, yes, even arguing about it) shows that you care enough to fix it. If you like the pretty girl, let her know in a straightforward, simple, and honest way. Remember, if she’s a nice girl, she’s probably just as terrified as you. But at least it won’t be because you came across as a creepy stalker freak show.

Mags writes books with kissing and ghosts in them. You can bother her on Twitter.

The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we’re living in one of the peak times to get drunk, but humans have been getting famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house’s lawn after a kegger, history is littered with world-changing events that were secretly powered by booze. The inaugural games of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees probably regretted in the morning.

Join Jack O’Brien and Cracked staffers Carmen Angelica, Alex Schmidt, Michael Swaim, plus comedian Blake Wexler for a retelling of history’s biggest moments you didn’t realize everyone was drunk for.

Get your tickets here:

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/you-may-be-a-good-dude-but-heres-why-youre-single/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/175073121532

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allofbeercom · 6 years

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You May Be A Good Dude, But Here’s Why You’re Single

The Big Sickly Sweet Romantic Gesture

Get it wrong and you’ve just shot Cupid’s dick clean off.

pixdeluxe/iStock “I made a sand castle based on floor plans from your childhood home.”

Universal Pictures This is not love.

In real life, there are just so many ways to get it wrong.

Martin Dimitrov/iStock “That doesn’t even look like me. Terrible.”

The Freaking Generous Grand Gesture

Money makes people weird. It just does. Especially when everyone else shows up to a birthday party thinking a “hey” is all the occasion requires, and you walk in with a gift-wrapped Xbox.

Showering Them With Time And Attention, All The Time … Non Stop

The “I’m Just Trying To Protect You” Thing

You Avoid Confrontation At All Costs

Don’t do that.

Mags writes books with kissing and ghosts in them. You can bother her on Twitter.

Get your tickets here:

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/you-may-be-a-good-dude-but-heres-why-youre-single/

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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When leaving the house is impossible, cocktails, caftans, and karaoke are all the vacation you need Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She’s writing from the Philadelphia home in which she’s sheltered and convalesced since March. Two weeks before the city of Philadelphia went into lockdown, I was in an airport in Ixtapa, Mexico, staring at a travel advisory about the coronavirus. It was early enough that the sign was asking if you’d recently traveled to China or Italy; early enough that it was small and had come off a laser printer and was taped near our airline’s check-in desk. We’d spent the week at a resort on the Pacific coast with a fellow writer couple, taking our first real vacation — our first travel experience without a restrictive budget or attached work or other obligations — in our adult lives. There’d been a break in my book tour schedule, and I took it. I wanted to read, eat seafood, see the ocean, and swim in an infinity pool, and I’d done all of those things. I even had the patchy mix of a tan and sunburn to prove it. I did thousand-piece puzzles and re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read books and stared into space. I’m a speculative writer and a hypochondriac. I’ve written stories about pandemics; imagined their slow and terrible creep, the way they stifle and challenge. Still, back in February we had not been to China or Italy. We flew home. We hugged our friends goodbye and declared the vacation a success. Let’s do it again next year, we said. When we unpacked, everything in our suitcases smelled like vacation: sunblock, salt, chlorine. I inhaled every piece of clothing before I put it in the hamper. You know what happened next, of course. Coronavirus crested and broke on our shores and we, Americans — leaderless, stubborn, foolhardy to the end — were uniquely unsuited for thriving or survival. The welcome pause in my travel schedule turned into a monthslong quarantine that has not yet abated. My wife, Val, began to work from home. I did thousand-piece puzzles and re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and read books and stared into space. I talked on the phone with my girlfriend, Marne, who was quarantined with their aunt and uncle on Long Island; I read out loud to them from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, a few pages at a time. Our ancient beagle mix, Rosie, went from overjoyed with our presence to vaguely neurotic, shadowing us everywhere we went, unable to be left alone for even a moment. Still, we were luckier than most. We were safe, able to do our work from home. Plus, our house had enough space that we didn’t want to murder each other. We decided to pull a new tarot card each morning. A couple of months into lockdown, I was approved for some long-awaited ankle surgery. A few weeks later, a post-op complication with the incision felled me. My doctor put me on hardcore antibiotics that kept me awake for days and made me manic. (“Maybe I can sleep like this,” I’d apparently insisted to my horrified wife, twisted into a bizarre pretzel on our living room couch; I have no memory of the incident.) I was also prescribed a wound-vac, which turned out to be a medical fetish object that relieved pressure on the incision through a gentle sucking organ; the experience is not entirely unlike being seduced by an octopus. I made jokes about “fresh, organic Carmen juice” and watched liquid move through the tube and listened to the creature’s gentle burbling when everything was quiet. A few weeks later, I was given a skin graft that had been grown in a pig’s bladder. It was thin as tissue paper. My doctor told me I still couldn’t bear weight on that foot, and I had to continue to use my mobility scooter to get around. I left the appointment in a terrible mood, blasting System of a Down at full volume. It was Marne’s idea to pitch a staycation. It’s a hateable word, as overused and near-meaningless as “self-care.” As my infirmity stretched on and on, my girlfriend decided to temporarily move in with me and my wife to help out. “I guess it’s like Big Love over there?” their aunt asked. It was certainly specific enough of a scenario to be prestige TV: polyamorous writer dykes and their internet-famous geriatric hound riding out a pandemic and a climate-change-worsened heat wave in a rambling Philadelphia Victorian. This was how Eater found me: Did I want to go camping and write about it? asked a very nice editor. Did I want to do a road trip? Maybe stay at a cabin in the woods? It’s the new American vacation; socially isolated, iconic. We were tempted. We spent time scrolling through listings for beach houses and lake houses, but the necessary elements — within a reasonable driving distance, dog-friendly, scooter-accessible, on a body of water, and affordable — seemed impossible. “Vacation-style eating” included lobster rolls with a side of hound. The Death Card on day 1 signaled a time of transition. It was Marne’s idea to pitch a staycation. It’s a hateable word, as overused and near-meaningless as “self-care.” And it has a distinctly American flair to it: our inability to take actual breaks, the way we accept lack of real vacation the way, say, Europeans never would. And how does one create a true staycation? That is, a vacation from home that feels genuinely relaxing and separate from the everyday grind, not just an excuse to binge seven seasons of The Great British Bake Off? Val and I had our recent perfect vacation as a kind of platonic ideal. I loved the understated luxury of the experience: I swanned around in caftans and bathing suits, swam, ate well and always al fresco, read a ton, was good about staying off the internet, and was generally oblivious to the apocalypse inching towards us (that is, mostly stayed off Twitter and turned off New York Times news alerts). This both translated easily to a staycation — outfits, reading, and staying off the internet were well within my grasp — and not at all. We don’t have a pool. We’d have to cook ourselves. The outdoors are full of mosquitos, and getting to them required me to climb down flights of stairs with one functioning leg. Val, on the other hand, had primarily enjoyed our trip’s lack of responsibilities: no cooking meals, no walking the dog. Her staycation version of this was doing everything she wanted — puttering around in the backyard, harvesting produce from her plot in the community garden — and nothing she didn’t. Marne had different ideas: They wanted to make something. Their idea of a vacation was buying a new cookbook and trying a bunch of different recipes. Everyone agreed on one thing: We wanted to be able to swim, or something akin to it. I ordered a self-inflating adult-sized kiddie pool from the internet. An ice cream maker, too, and David Lebowitz’s The Perfect Scoop (recommended by Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen) and a portable projector to have a drive-in movie experience in the backyard. (My idea; as a child, drive-ins were one of my favorite parts of summer.) We agreed on a set of principles: to stay off social media as much as possible; eat frequently and well; do our own personal activities that we enjoyed and come together when we wanted to. We would share the cooking, make one night a takeout night, and have brunch on Sunday. And we decided to pull a single tarot card each morning, as a way of bringing ourselves into the day. Val is a long-time tarot enthusiast; I am generally suspicious of woo-woo but find tarot to be a pleasing intersection of art and the language of the subconscious. And of us love the act of ritual. So yes, we said. Tarot it would be. Cheap flip flops and pool lounging (here, by Marne) are part of the normal summer excess. On day one, Marne pulled the death card, of course. The deck is the Carnival at the End of the World, and the death card is a scythe-bearing skeleton on a dead horse upon a hill of decapitated heads. Marne barked with laughter and then, slightly freaked out, left the room to collect themselves. Val had to explain that, unlike in the movies, a death card was rarely bad. It was powerful but positive. It was about transitions, changes. Exactly the sort of card you’d expect to kick off a move from the harried hours of real life to a true break. But we weren’t ready, not yet. The house was a mess, something I knew would impede me from enjoying vacation fully. We’d ordered a new bed frame a few weeks before that should have been assembled, but it was missing a necessary piece; said piece had only shown up the day before. So the bed needed assembling, too. Oh, and there was dog hair everywhere: lining the couch cushions, floating like tumbleweeds across the hardwood. I realized that this was the piece of vacation I missed the most: arriving in a new, clean space with your responsibilities wiped clean. Not having to fuss about details because someone else has fussed about them for you. But that sort of vacation has evaporated into the ether, so we agreed to just power through a final act of cleaning and organizing and assembling, and have our vacation start at happy hour. We hardly noticed the strange smell that was developing in the backyard. And it did. At 5 p.m., I made us a batch of cocktails — bastardized Pimm’s cups, complete with cucumber, mint from Val’s garden, and dried orange slices. I put on Taylor Swift’s Folklore, which had dropped the day before. Then we made dinner: corn risotto, whose page in Cook’s Illustrated we’d dogeared and been salivating over for days; seared scallops; and fried artichokes. We got slightly tipsy and marveled at the recipe’s fussiness: pureeing corn cob milk with fresh kernels and then squeezing the liquid out of the resulting pulp. Val shucked, Marne made the rice. I hyper-focused on my task, pressing the mixture down with the back of a spoon, staring at the measuring cup. It was the first time in a month that we’d all cooked together, and the process felt light and almost labor-less. The jumbo scallops sizzled and browned and looked restaurant-elegant; the artichokes seared beautifully. It was as fine a summer meal as I’d ever eaten. We sat at the dining room table with the windows open; replaced the fading sunset with the light from an overhead fixture. After the food was gone, we moved from subject to subject. Marne maintained that while the risotto was delicious, corn is best served on the cob. We meditated on the true meaning of the Death card we’d drawn. Was it about using up the week’s leftovers? Finishing assembling the bed? We moved on to the topic of ejaculation (comma, my ex-boyfriends, comma, their ex-girlfriends). After dinner, we watched two episodes of Steven Universe — aptly, the ones that introduce a polyamorous character, the Gem Flourite — and climbed into bed feeling very satisfied with ourselves. Marne made biscuits for Sunday brunch. Saturday morning, we sat in my office and drank coffee and drew the emperor. This deck’s version of the emperor is a eyeless gentleman elephant standing on a mountain of tusks. It is considered a sign of stability and material wealth. It made sense, then, that we remembered to make a batch of milk-chocolate-raspberry ice cream so that it would be ready in the evening. It made sense that a particularly beautiful cream-and-cocoa silk chiffon caftan that I’d ordered a month ago from Jibri arrived in the mail, and I put it on with nothing underneath. It made sense that we ate leftovers — practical! — and then made our way outside, where I read Jennifer Egan’s The Keep beneath a fringed umbrella and Val and Marne blew up the inflatable pool and paddled around, insisting I join them while I demurred. It made sense that we ordered out for dinner, and could not decide between New England-style lobster rolls and bright summer salads (corn, grilled peach, and scallion; watermelon and feta), from Philly summer pop-up Anchor Light, or Lebanese plates and dips (from Suraya: hummus and baba ghanoush and labneh and tabbouleh; charred runner beans and fried cauliflower in hot-mint yogurt and lamb kebabs and crispy batata harra), so we ordered both. We sat and ate and Val and Marne went back in the water and I finished reading as the light bled from the sky. We hardly noticed the strange smell that was developing in the backyard. We went inside and our ice cream was waiting. Watching Twister in the backyard When we woke up on Sunday, I opened the bedroom door (shut to preserve the air conditioning) to a smell like I’d never experienced before. It smelled like a moose had climbed three flights of stairs only to die in our hallway. The odor permeated every floor of the house. I closed the door and went back to bed like a woman with the vapors. Val and Marne ventured to the backyard, where the tiniest tentacles of the smell had begun the night before. Flashlight in hand, Val rooted around under the crawlspace and discovered a decomposing squirrel. It felt like an omen, or maybe a metaphor, or maybe a giant fuck-you from a year that won’t let up. In bed, I began to call wildlife removal services, all of which were closed on Sundays, prohibitively expensive, or too far away. “This doesn’t happen at hotels,” I said, staring at the ceiling. Val smeared vapor-rub under her nostrils like a coroner and crawled under the house to retrieve the squirrel. She bagged it and walked several blocks away to our old apartment building, where she disposed of it in the dumpster. She came back and filled every floor with shallow dishes of white vinegar and baking soda and coffee grounds. She showered. We drew a tarot card. An inverted eight of wands. A wreathed and naked woman upon a pangolin over a scattered pile of sticks, and a cosmic imperative to take a break. The smell faded. We knew we needed to get into the mood for day three. Brunch, we agreed. I pulled together a bloody mary — homemade horseradish vodka, EPIC Pickles bloody mary mix from central Pennsylvania, pickled okra, cornichons, dilly beans, and a strip of bacon — and made a tomato salad with whipped feta. Marne made biscuits, and we ate until we were full. I took a long, hot nap in our sunroom and then went to the living room, where we watched Gourmet Makes videos from Bon Appétit. It was supposed to be outdoor movie night, but we couldn’t do it; we were exhausted. In bed, we watched Birds of Prey projected against the far wall. “I just want to watch women beating up some men,” Marne said, and I could not argue otherwise. The setup was practically nothing: a cheap pool ordered from overseas, barely cool hose water, a postage-stamp-sized city backyard. On Monday, we drew an eight of pentacles: an omen of plenty, represented by a baker and a trio of puffins and a tray of rolls for sharing. We prepped another batch of ice cream, this one my suggestion: roasted banana. While it churned, we took a moment to mourn our last day. Marne and Val were determined to get me into the pool. I hesitated — I couldn’t get my bad ankle wet — but eventually I slipped on my waterproof shower sock and crawled into the water with Marne, then Val, with Marne supporting me like a human chair. I confess that I’d been skeptical of the pool. If lying in an adult-sized inflatable pool was as lovely as getting in an actual pool, everyone would do it, right? When I’d ordered it, I was reminded of my grandfather asking my 6-year-old self if I wanted to go in a “Cuban swimming pool” before dunking me into a large bucket of water. And yet, it is astonishing what water can do. The setup was practically nothing: a cheap pool ordered from overseas, barely cool hose water, a postage-stamp-sized city backyard. But we were in our suits and slathered on sunscreen and it felt, for a few hours, like summer. Not the unique misery of 2020’s summer, but other summers with their normal excess and low stakes and abundance, their cheap flip-flops and pool afternoons and water ice and late sunsets. We stayed there floating, laughing, talking, until the sun went. Dinner was Beyond Burgers — the best of the meatless proteins we’ve tried — with aged cheddar and caramelized onions and avocado and chipotle aioli on toasted buns. We polished them off and they were perfect; the sort of thing you wanted at the end of a summer day. Then we had a sundae bar: homemade hot fudge with bourbon, fried peanuts, homemade whipped cream, and large marshmallows toasted over the flame of our gas stove. This, all over the weekend’s two homemade ice creams; a perfectly decadent end. Outside, it was dark. We flipped on the string lights and set up the projector and screen against the neighbor’s fence. Then, we watched Twister, a perfect summer drive-in-style film about human arrogance in the face of natural disaster. Oh, and the indescribable appeal of Helen Hunt. But mostly the human arrogance thing. Val slipped me popcorn; Marne sat near our feet. A few blocks away, a dead squirrel rotted in a dumpster. We enjoyed our pleasures even as we were trapped by a country that can’t get its act together. We ate and laughed and mourned our lost summer and laughed again. And what’s more American than that? from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Q7xXiB

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-exhausting-work-of-staycationing.html

#EasyFoodNetwork #ComfortFoodRecipes #EasyRecipes #GoodFood #BestComfortFoodRecipes #TastyFoodv

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