Gray Day in Chelsea

The precursor to the holiday weekend is a gray and rainy one.  

To add to the celebration-worthiness, it's also Bob Dylan's birthday.  The good people at Slate added to the festivities with this nifty map with a pin on (they claim) every location Dylan mentions in any of his songs.  There is definitely some fun to be had playing with that.

If you zoom way in on the NYC area of the map, you'll eventually land on this location, where he claims in this great song, that he wrote this other, even greater, song.

[There is some vintage video and some interesting lyric changes in that live version of Sara linked above.  In case you are interested in that kind of thing.]

Took that shot in front of one of our favorite coffee shops.  Then turned west and took this shot of an even bigger, if less historic, proclamation of Chelsea.

Have a good Memorial Day weekend, everybody.  And happy birthday Bob.

We Are All Bradley Manning

Daniel Ellsberg

I was the Bradley Manning of my day. In 1971 I too faced life (115 years) in prison for exposing classified government lies and crimes. President Obama says “the Ellsberg material was classified on a different basis.” True. The Pentagon Papers were not Secret like the Wikileaks revelations, they were all marked Top Secret—Sensitive.

Ultimately all charges in my case were dropped because of criminal governmental misconduct toward me during my proceedings. Exactly the same outcome should occur now, in light of the criminal conditions of Manning’s confinement for the last six months.

From: I Am Bradley Manning

Monday Remedy

Say you had a busy weekend.  Say you had a houseguest (a great one!), plus a more-than-usually satisfying audition you helped a friend with, and an art opening, followed by going to a show at Lincoln Center, and then Sunday you played tennis in Central Park and then gave the final performance of the show you were in, then met friends and went to another show from the same festival your show was a part of, then saw another out of town guest.

Of course, that's just one way to have a busy weekend.  You probably have your own ways of doing it.

Then on Monday you might go back to the office or the shop or the salt mine or wherever you work.  You're feeling ok, but you've been beating back a cold and maybe you didn't really get as much sleep as you'd have liked and you haven't had a chance to rest rest for a while, so you have a perfectly ok day and you get a lot done, but you don't really click into gear. 

But on the way home you might stop by that fancy grocery on the corner which for some reason gives you a really good price on shiitake mushrooms.  So before your girlfriend comes home, you mince up some garlic and onion and put it in a bowl with oil and a Malaysian spice blend (which may or may not have been created by the artist who made the show you went to on Saturday) of turmeric, cumin, cayenne, coriander, cinnamon, and some other herbs and goodies, plus a few dashes of that insanely spicy naga jolokia sauce you got when you were in the Keys, and you marinate the chicken breast you brought out of the freezer this morning in the mix.  Then you decompress from the day for a while, which is nice.  And the gal comes home and you let her do her own decompression while you go back in the kitchen and put on some good music and whip up some wild rice and chop those shiitakes into strips, sear and stir fry the chicken and then put in the mushroom strips, and you finish it off with a shot of liquid aminos and give one last stir, serve on a bed of greens and top with crumbled bleu cheese and dressing.

I'm calling that a remedy to a Mediocre Monday.

Plus we got to watch the premier of a very cool show that Cory worked on!