New York City Metblogs » z_nyc_daniel

can’t talk. eating.

z_nyc_daniel — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 07:52:51 +0000

Please please please go to New Green Bo for dinner. Tonight.
Though the Citysearch review tries to antagonize me into believing that this restaurant’s soup dumplings “attracted much attention when they were first discovered by mainstream food critics several years ago,” I feel I must call attention to them once more. For they are earth-shattering in their deliciousness. Go there.
It ain’t pretty. But if it’s pretty and in Chinatown, it’s probably no good.

manhattan mini-storage has lost it

z_nyc_daniel — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 12:34:11 +0000

Ad I stared at on the downtown R for twenty minutes:
“Imagine having room for a table instead of burning your crotch!”
I…wha?

Monica lives again

z_nyc_daniel — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 15:16:54 +0000

Self-whoring has always taken a back seat to actual, y’know, news and information on this blog. I thought it was time to reverse the trend, if I may.
http://www.nymf.org/monica.htm
Okay. Couple of things:
1) We are very excited to be associated with this festival.
2) That’s not actually my name (Daniel J. Blau).
3) That’s not actually my brother’s name (Adam Blau).
4) That’s not actually Tracie’s name (Tracie Potochnik).
5) I thought we were keeping our own reservation list until about sixteen point four seconds ago.
6) I looked at the “genre guide” way too quickly, and I really thought they considered our show to fit into the genres of: family, gay-themed, improvised, cabaret, comedy, drama, contemporary sounds, classic musical theatre, special event, and music theatre.
7) We are very excited to be associated with this festival.
I would tell you all to come, but, well, still not sure…

dan talks karma, baby

z_nyc_daniel — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 13:48:15 +0000

By special request of the NYC Metblog. Originally posted at www.pamie.com
When I first moved to New York, I floated a somewhat Carrie-Bradshaw-esque theory of urban life that has held up remarkably well in the years since I proposed it, even though that was six minutes after I graduated from college at a time I thought the Spice Girls would outlast that young Spears upstart. The theory went that there was a pie chart of human experience — “karmas,” as I faux-spiritually called them — split into three distinct sections: the job karma, the housing karma, and the work karma. The three karmas always add up to 100%, but the ratios within that pie are apt to change weekly, even daily. I know it sounds a bit life-as-USA-Today-infographic, but I swear it works.
For two years, I lived in a palace I wouldn’t have deserved to live in as the Sultan of Brunei, much less as a twenty-three year-old writer battling the strong, choppy headwinds of the New York City real estate market. It was owned by a friend of my roommate’s family, and I vowed upon moving in that leaving that apartment meant I was leaving New York, which turned out to be the case. It was beautiful. It was wood. Two of my best friends still live there. They’re getting married. It was an apartment so pretty it made you fall in love.
For the first year I lived in that apartment, I had a killer place and a shitty job. Then another shitty job. Then temping. I went on exactly zero dates.
(January 2000) Apartment Karma: 100%. Job Karma: 0%. Relationship Karma: 0%.
You’d think suddenly acquiring mice in one’s Palace Of Park Slope would be a bad thing, I’ll bet. And at one time, I would have been inclined to very strongly agree with you. Having braved the inevitable nasty bugs this city inflicts upon even its most privileged inhabitants, I always thought mice wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. After all, they were warm-blooded. They had tails. They also had the capability to be animated cartoon characters. In my imagination, they were even kind of cute. Y’know. Like pets.
No. No, they weren’t like pets. They weren’t like pets at all. They were more like fucking vermin, and they were coming in through the fireplace, through the bedroom walls, through the kitchen cabinets, through a hole behind the stove. They made their restroom lodgings in a bowl filled with decorative rice and flowers we could no longer leave where horrified visitors could see it. I cried. I begged the exterminator to hurry the hell up. I slept with the lights on. With my eyes open. Under a blanket of traps. On the roof. Of a nearby hotel. The very same month, I was hired full-time and was temporarily set for life in a job I loved. I still couldn’t get a date.
(October 2000) Apartment Karma: 30%. Job Karma: 70%. Relationship Karma: 0%.
I moved to LA and then back to New York and began a string of unfortunate apartment searches that ended with me in places less pretty, more expensive, in worse areas, and with less light than the place I had just left. Work was dwindling, and then I became employed by a fire-breathing monster. I went on some horrible dates, but hell, at least it kept that karma from statistical fucking null set for a while. Thanks, Los Angeles.
(January 2002) Apartment Karma: 49%. Job Karma: 1%. Relationship Karma:50%.
The musical took off (May 2003) and then stopped (um, right now). I was living in the middle of nowhere (October 2003) but living alone. I had my heart inflated (July 2002) and subsequently broken (December 2002). Better to have loved and lost.
(2003, all) Apartment Karma: 10-90%. Job Karma: 10-90%. Relationship Karma: 10-90%. But always a cumulative 100%.
Now I’m back in the only neighborhood I could ever picture myself living in as long as I’m in New York. It’s the place my brother lived in when he was in New York and it’s just totally fabulous. In April, I’ll need to find a roommate. At least that means I can count on some play.
Damn. If it’s that Carrie-Bradshaw-esque, maybe this entry needs a more appropriate ending:
All of which led me to thinking…can New Yorkers really have their pie and eat it, too?

i’m back! oh, wait a sec.

z_nyc_daniel — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 09:25:54 +0000

Well, say goodbye to the flier I’ve had tacked to my bulletin board for the march and rally on the eve of the RNC. After a week in rural Oregon watching my two hippie friends get married among wildflowers on the banks of the Deschutes River (it’s a real river…even my spell check knows it), I’m here for three days and then off to LA for work. When there’s a Metblog for the city that exists 35,000 feet above Nebraska, I’ll be the first one to post.
I miss New York. Even Republican-infested New York. How many times can one human being be forced to watch Starsky & Hutch?
I am about to find out.

i’m my friend john’s publicist

z_nyc_daniel — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 08:46:33 +0000

Y’all, I’ve whored Joe’s Pub before, but they’re doing this thing this year that’s awesome. It’s this, Joe’s Pub in the park.
THE INAUGURAL CONCERT SERIES PRESENTED BY THE PUBLIC THEATER IN ASSOCIATION WITH MTV AND VHI, FEATURING PERFORMANCES BY JONATHA BROOKE, MOS DEF, GAVIN DEGRAW, BEBEL GILBERTO, MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO, SUZANNE VEGA, UTE LEMPER, JOE JACKSON, TODD RUNDGREN!
It’s because I was trapped on the 18th Floor of the Regency Hotel for a damn press junket all weekend that I have no the hell else idea what to talk about. Anthing not having to do with work doesn’t make any sense to me right now. What’s an “Olympics”?
And I’m leaving to spend five days in Portland. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

but he ruled on newsradio

z_nyc_daniel — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 07:52:20 +0000

Oh, friendly neighborhood Andy Dick. Why do you have to make New Yorkers even more skittish than we already are? I feel like he’s in my living room, waiting to lunge at me at any second.

oh, bill, is there anything you can’t do?

z_nyc_daniel — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 07:36:39 +0000

I know Saturday Night Live is something New York shares with the rest of the world, and often that’s not very nice of us. But really, this would be awesome.

joe’s pub, so pretty

z_nyc_daniel — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 07:52:02 +0000

Last night at Joe’s Pub, I had the pleasure of seeing writer/singer/piano genius Heather Greene, who my friend booked at the place to the delight of the huge-ass crowd. His pitch was everything that made me want to go to the show. He was like, “It’s a little Norah Jones and a little Fiona Apple!” No Norah Jones fan myself, he tried again: “It’s Fiona Apple crossed with a blow job!” That worked. She does a moody cover of The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” which will make you love her. Also, beer with a friend discount rules.
The other performer on the bill was an Amy Kohn, whose music veered more toward the genre of “vocal jazz, but, y’know, bad.” She was accompanied by a brilliantly talented band of random instruments. A trumpet here, an upright bass there, a back-up singer singing a minor third above Amy Kohn everywhere. She gestured wildly instead of playing the piano a lot and sang a song about her “response to September 11″ that seemed like it was out of a Lower East Side poetry slam on September 12. But by far my favorite rhyming couplet of the night came in a song entitled something like “Ice Lady,” in which she plinkity-plinked the keys and crooned, “Sits on the buffet, slowly melts away” over and over and over again. A song about an ice sculpture. It sounded better with a sousaphone. Actually, no it didn’t.

avoid route 4

z_nyc_daniel — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 10:59:21 +0000

When someone — like the news, the sign on the George Washington Bridge, and your sister in New Jersey — tells you to avoid Route 4 because of Sunday construction in Hackensack…you guys, avoid Route 4. I was coming from Long Island because I’m always convinced it’s going to be shorter to take the train all the way out to my parents, grab the car, and then drive. And it’s not. It’s not shorter at all. The only thing better about it is that I get to be in a private space, listening to music. Or, if I should so choose, to traffic reports trumpeting the fact that I’m not going anywhere because I’m trapped in construction traffic on Route 4.
You think once you’re off the Cross Bronx and over the GWB you’re home free. You’re not.
But at least I missed Mets traffic. And bridge traffic. And…this.