Drink Your Cab Fare

If you find it impossible to think of a single reason to leave Brooklyn for a drink, let alone venture above 86th, this one's for you.

Take a cab to the Village Pourhouse on 109th and Amsterdam and the bar will reimburse you for your cab fare in the form of a bar tab!

You will still have to pay for a cab ride home, of course, but by then you'll be too drunk off of semi-free booze to care! Pish posh, credit card payments...

Got Skills?

While the over-educated masses sit around on their butts desperate for work and cursing their expensive, seemingly useless degrees, a certain population of U.S. workers can't even keep up with their job offers.

The New York Times reports that companies and contracters looking to hire experienced skilled labor are having trouble filling the positions -- it took one manager 18 months to find the 80 welders he needed for one particular project.

Those who are looking to retrain for a new skill in order to dive back into that job market should consider the following, according to the Times: welding; critical care nursing; electrical lining; special education; geotechnical engineering; repiratory therapy; and civil engineering. Nurses, as always, are also in demand, but slightly less so than in recent years, partly because many are coming out of retirement back into the work force since the recession hit.

But, however wise it may be to get some training now, this immediate opening in the job market is not for recent vocational school graduates Most of the jobs going unfilled right now require skills that take years to attain, and in some cases employers even demand ten years of experience before considering a resume. Plus, according to one Oregon-based research firm, often times those who have the vocational training necessary for these jobs do not have the educational background that employers seek in filling demanding and high-paying skilled labor jobs- so getting an academic education first is not a waste of time, but instead a means to reach the upper level and higher paying of skilled labor jobs.

No Overhead = Gourmet for $10 per Head

It all started in a taco truck.

What is now a growing phenomenon of "nonrestaurants" in the bay area got its start with one guy named Anthony Myint. He was a line cook with a dream, a dream that one day he would get out from behind that hot and sweaty grill, escape the monotony of an established restaurant, and run - or drive, as it were - his own damn kitchen!

Myint decided to sublet a local taco truck - the cost of which was low enough to allow him to dive right in without too much planning or paperwork. Working out of that truck a couple nights a week, he started to create original, delicious sandwiches and sell them on the street in San Francisco's Mission District.

The mobile venture was so cheap in fact that Myint could afford to use only excellent, eco-friendly, local and generally P.C. ingredients - and for this he gained huge popularity with the crunchy foodies that abound in the Bay area.

The truckstaurant eventually could not meet the demand for Myint's creations, so he moved on to sublet a local Chinese restaurant for use two nights a week, with the help of his wife. To their own amazement, the (semi?)restaurant continued to turn a major profit, week after week. The couple decided that they would, after paying themselves a modest hourly wage, donate the rest of their proceeds to food-related charities.

They hope that what they've done will be profitable enough to really catch on as a business model, and that the idea of having a restaurant (or other business) that directly benefits the community will come to be so popular that it will be its own marketing strategy. Whether or not this happens, and I hope that it does, the idea is also a great way for restaurants and other small business to deal with decreased demand and profit during the recession - giving up their lease and sharing that of another restaurant, for example, and using the space on alternating nights.

Mission Street Food now has a blog, where they advertise their special events, favorite food charities, and menu. Some delicious-sounding and creative selections from the latter are: a pork belly jicama salad, shrimp and grits, smoked duck beignets, and a buttermilk panna cotta dessert. All of these at only $6 - $8 each!

Save the Hot Dogs!

That's it, I take back all of my doubts and criticism - we must rescue GM at all costs!

Do it for the hot dogs!!!

Street Art for the Recession

Perhaps it is the same air of renewed commitment and creativity among artists that I blogged about last week that we have to thank for a whole new batch of fascinating and uniquely recession-era street art cropping up in New York.


Back in April, Brian Lehrer interviewed the founders of Wooster Collective, a group of street artists based in Manhattan, about street art given the listener reports of some fresh graffiti and stencils showing up all over the city New York with a distinct economic theme.

The WNYC website linked to a couple of great examples of these pieces, below:

1) a sarcastic bubble-letter sticker encouraging you to "enjoy subprime lending;"
2) a stencil of former treasury secretary Henry Paulsen, fed. chairman Ben Bernanke, and former SEC chairman Christopher Cox, below the caption "Axis of Evil."
3) spraypaint by the Holland Tunnel asking, "where's my f*cking bailout?

Marc and Sarah Schiller, the Wooster Collective founders, describe street art as a "mirror to society," and say that it allows the city itself to act as a canvas for any artist with something to say. But, what is most exciting to me about this is really true for anyone with something to say. For this medium more than most, it seems anyone with "something to say" (and with the guts to risk getting caught) can be an artist.
Street art is a subversive medium, but one with mass access and a huge audience. The combination gives it great potential to communicate ideas which aren't expressed in the mainstream media, and need to squeeze themselves into the spotlight through other means instead.

In addition to standard spray paint graffiti and stencils, the Schillers mentioned a few more elaborate street art "installations" that can be found around New York.
I found one such installation artist with some great pieces online at WebUrbanist. Brad Downey dresses himself as a city maintenance or construction worker so as to be essentially invisible as he goes about setting up his funky installations, like these (right.)

Phone booth installations are popular, according to the Schillings, because so many of the phone booths in New York are unused, defunct, and forgotten.

Artists replace the backlit ads with their own work, adding something interesting to the landscape while aggressively rejecting the world of advertising our consumer culture, as well as commenting on a wasted urban infrastructure.

So perk up your peripheral vision next time you're on the streets, and see what art you find.

No Food, Plenty of Food for Thought

You may be worried lately that New York's starving artists are becoming even more starving during this recession. You may even be afraid that they will become an endangered species! In fact, if you are like most of the country these days, you stay up at nights wondering, but what about art?!? What will the poor artists do?!? Well, don't fear, concerned patron! Artists are totally digging the recession.

A couple of recent articles suggest that artists are actually feeling more optimistic and creatively liberated since the recession hit. Why? Well, for one such artist, the economic downturn means freedom from the boring gigs that she endured to pay her rent (endless Gershwin and Porter requests, yuck); for another it's a break from creating commissioned (and therefore creatively limited) pieces. Of her newfound freedom, the latter said “Nobody wants me to do anything, so I’m just doing what I want." (Hmm, sounds like my high school social life.) Whatever the case, this New York Times article cited a whole population of artists who feel that the recession has, more than anything, strengthened their commitment to and concentration on their craft.

A songwriter interviewed indicated that more free time lets his thoughts flow more freely, saying “I walked through Central Park twice this week and emerged with songs ready to go.” One visual artist's optimism came partly from analysis of the market (she predicts a decrease in the production of “market-oriented art that is being churned out by the bulk," which is a tough competitor for original and independent works.)

So rest easy. Those artists aren't going anywhere. You can read the hundreds of reponses to the NYTimes question "What effect is the economy having on your life and work as an artist, writer, actor, or musician?" here.