Jesus & Mary Chain in NYC

On January 31, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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This is the kind of music you come here to see, but it only opens up for a few moments every now and then, and then closes up, seemingly forever.  It’s never really forever, but a city fueled by the ethos of the young, where amazing things have to happen immediately, waiting even a month is impossible, and 3 years is a lifetime away, and happens after all the interesting people have left.  But it’s more than possible and even likely to see things pop up again in this city after they’ve left the world forever in every other place on earth.  In the meantime, there are always fantastic restaurants and luxury hotels.  New York City does not mess around with treating its guests to a stylishly good time here.

If you want to hear the music, however, from twenty of thirty years ago, the best way is to have been here then, and then play with it in your memory.  But it’s more than likely that the music of our youth is beautiful because we could never hold onto it at the time.  And at the time, most of us were probably well aware that there would be many details that get forgotten over time.  The big moment for the Jesus and Mary Chain actually lasted longer than it does for most bands.  Given their appetite for extreme fun, it’s also unusual that there would be so many memories that are still memorable.

But it’s always an adventure watching artists and audiences try to visit an elusive past, and that’s exactly what happened when they played Webster Hall a couple years ago.  They’ve been officially disbanded since 1998, lasting a good fifteen years.  This is excellent mileage for a group that used to incite their loving public in Scotland to riots during famously short and furious sets when they refused to even turn around and look at the audience.  There’s also the punk trope of not tuning the instruments, and the bass player only playing with 2 strings.  These are the stories that make memories, and reunion shows like this come along every once in awhile to remind us that no one here really remembers anything correctly, and surprisingly, that’s good news.

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Wedding on a Budget

On January 28, 2010, in Wedding, by laura
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Every little girl dreams of her wedding day since she was 5 years old. She has a picture in her mind of what her dress will look like, the flowers, the cake, everything. So once she meets that perfect man everything begins to move very quickly. It is then that she realizes that the fairy tale wedding of her dreams is going to cost a lot more than she anticipated. Before the meltdown can occur, it is good to know that there is something that can be done. There are ways to cut down on some of the costs without losing the dream.
One of the most expensive parts of the wedding is the location. By hosting the ceremony and reception at the same location you can save a bundle on booking fees. Some places will even offer a discount if you stay at the same location. Transglobe property management has a variety of commercial properties that can provide that perfect spot on the most special day. The website for Transglobe property management lists many of their properties.
Another very expensive aspect of the wedding is the flowers. One way to really cut down on flower costs is to do it yourself with artificial flowers. Not only are they considerably cheaper than real ones but you can also save yourself a lot of time and stress by getting them done ahead of time.
Many girls imagine a big beautiful cake, that will ultimately end up costing you more than you want to imagine. To save yourself some dough, no pun intended, on the cake consider getting a smaller cake for you and your new hubby while you guests enjoy sheet cakes from someplace like Costco. They still taste delicious but will cost considerably less.
These are just a few of the many ways to trim costs and fit your dream wedding into your much too realistic budget .

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Organizational Development Potholes

On January 27, 2010, in Business, by laura
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Maryam was a client in another suit of the building where I worked. Her walk was always rushed and that was dangerous in the parking lot. There were numerous potholes that pockmarked the tar and pieces of garbage too. We were near to an industrial can shop where soda pop cans were in constant manufacturing and so was the garbage from there too. Most businesses moved to our suite for only a couple months before moving again to another place. It was an intermediary zone where a business learned how to survive the worst a city could inflict on it.

Maryam often tripped in those potholes and over that garbage in her stilettos that were spiked and skinny much like her. I would almost always look up in time to see her defy gravity again and stay on her toes. My company offered management training programs among its other services, but I mostly did administrative work that left me with a couple minutes a day to do a bit of day dreaming or watch the other people who worked in our building navigate the dangerous parking lot.

I saw her a couple of days ago with these brochures in her hands for organizational development. I was far away, but I could tell what the print was for when she again plunged a bright red heel into a hole, spun around three times to catch what was left of her balance. In that time, her arms had let go of the brochures to grasp the air. The wind in turn took grasp of the brochures and started to throw them around the parking lot, dragging a few toward my little window where I worked. I peered out to see them. When I looked up again, she was dodging more potholes trying to catch the remainder of brochures that she could. There must have been fifty of them out there. She probably gave up around twenty, the other brochures becoming a part of the trash from the can place.

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Key Largo January

On January 19, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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January is a great time to get a room at one of the luxurious hotels sitting on Key Largo coastline. There are always some nice water and everglade activities to do in the area. You need to plan to spend some real time in the area to get the most out of it without exhausting yourself. There are a few state parks here like the Dagny Johnson Key Largo Hammock Botanical State Park, the one of a kind John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park and the Everglades National Park. On top of these there are endless under and on top water sports to keep you busy with fun.

At the end of January visitors can take part in the Key Largo Stone Crab and Seafood Festival. A weekend filled with things like fresh seafood of course, local entertainment, cooking tips and costume contests all set along the Rowell’s Marina. The event is sponsored by the local Key Largo Fisheries and Merchants Associations. It is meant to give families a fun day out together. Visitors will be able to do a little fishing which would be a nice break from the arts and crafts and vendor booths filled with all sorts of goodies. There will be a Junkanoo Band, fireworks and even a care show.

For kids there will be magic shows, little mermaid contest and a special fishing tent to host a kids tournament. For the parents there will be plenty of grilled oysters, coconut mahi mahi, and key lime pie eating contest. You wont want to miss Sunday when Black Ceaser and his pirate ship and crew invade the area. The tarps roll up and the bands play their first note at 11am and they roll back down and unplug at 8pm on Saturday and 4pm on Sun. It doesn’t cost much but will be a great day out in the sun and fresh ocean air.

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Beetle, Gossip and Lauren in New York

On January 18, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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By the time we finally woke up, it was 9am! We had no idea we slept so late, so we rushed getting ready and went walking from our very cheap New York hotel not far from JFK and caught the Metro to 94th street. We walked down to West 71st street and found what we were looking for, the Dakota Hotel, where John Lennon lived and then was gunned down outside of the Dakota. We placed our little tribute sign up against the steps. We knew it would be removed, but paying our respects to a former Beetle was an amazing release.

We didn’t have any plans for the rest of the day, so we decided to make our way to some place cool, as in somewhere with air-conditioning. It was 33 degrees outside. So, we hopped on the subway and rode it to 59th street. This is where we will do some long ignored shopping! Our first stop though, was to a small cafe for breakfast, pancakes to be precise. Then it was off to Tiffany & Co located on 5th Avenue. I purchased 2 items, my friend nothing, which stunned me utterly, I mean it’s Tiffany’s! You just can’t leave empty handed. Tiffany’s broke me, so we headed down the road a bit more and stopped in front of the ‘Gossip Girl‘ hotel and paid to go on the 3 and a half hour tour! If you don’t watch the show, then what I’m about to tell you won’t mean much, but we got to see where they shoot most of the show! We took as many photos as we could. We kept hoping for a sign of Chase Crawford, but there wasn’t a cast member in sight.

Our next stop, like we could even possibly top the ‘Gossip Girl’ tour, was to a candy shop, not just any old candy shop, but Dylan Lauren’s candy shop (Ralph Laurens daughter). Again I made a couple of purchases, this time pulling out the credit card. I’m way overspending, but that’s why we booked a cheap hotel! Final stop was back to our room to collapse, our as it’s coined ‘we shopped til we dropped’.

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Exploring the Exploritorium for Free in San Francisco

On January 16, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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One great thing about San Francisco, is the concept of ‘free day’s. There are certain times throughout the month in which admission to certain attractions, like the zoos and the museums are completely free! We had already had on our agenda to visit the ‘Exploratorium’ during our stay here, we’ve heard so much about it, because it’s similarity to the science museum that has tons of buttons to press and loads of interactive exhibits. We only happened upon the ‘free days’ when we were on-line searching for great restaurants at this site: http://www.sanfranciscorestaurant.com, when we noticed a link to free things in San Francisco too.

The first Wednesday of every month is when this museum would be free, so we put it on our list of things to do. What wasn’t obvious to us at the time, was how we didn’t realize that, of course, the free day would be the busiest day of the year! The queue was about 500 meters long; it wrapped around the entire building. Luckily, it didn’t take too long. The queue moved rather quickly and by the time we entered the museum, it didn’t seem that crowded. We managed to spend a few hours inside, having all kinds of fun with the Exploratorium. When we finished, we had enough energy to walk next door to the ‘Palace of Fine Arts’, which is one of the famous landmarks in San Francisco and was featured in a few films, like ‘The Rock’. We only spent 20 minutes inside, when we decided to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge, but this time we went via ‘Haight-Ashbury’ which is a very picturesque side of town.

We were very lucky that the weather was sunny and warm as we went around San Francisco today. Finally, our energy waned, so we headed on back to our hotel and freshened up for an evening of fine dining.

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Gypsy Rock and New York Blues

On January 12, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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It’s always at the end of the year, where all the business trips that were forgotten in the spring and summer start to stack up.  Like dishes in the sink, the trips collect, and even though they don’t make much sound, they’re there in the morning, and they’re there at bedtime.  Finally, after an unavoidable collapse and right before the next collapse, there’s one taken out and cleaned and then put to good use.  This was a night of dishes spent at one of New York’s airport hotels, exquisite and charming.  Enough here to make an evening last a month, if necessary, all of the best things in travel are right here, and some of the best of the most original comforts of the city.

Still, nights like these need strange company, so there’s time for time away from the hotel, and into the city, looking for some luck to come help make sense of a year whose luck was hard to pinpoint.  If there were a hundred lives, these might be enough to scale all the places from Soho to Harlem, and in time, after enough trips from enough years, it might be possible.  Tonight though it’s straight up and past the known city and into Astoria, where Gypsy guitars are making sense.  Cafe Antarsia is not the stuff of folklore, and not the stuff that makes sense in the moment.

But this is the real thing, where tradition meets up with different generations and different bloodlines to make sounds that speak to the river we go to when we dream.  Ruth Margraff is one of the angels that landed on a bridge in New York City and decided to stay incarnated.  It’s a song sung to heartbroken people everywhere, the ones who are still up at this time of night, at the end of a year, wanting to count more than grief on the first knuckle of the first finger.  There’s magic in the air.  Something lucky is tickling the ear, and somebody at the end of the bar is smiling even though they are not easily amused.

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New York Hats

On January 8, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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She was busy arranging her hair for the summer, it’s something she started every year, as a project.  It was never complete, and one of her secrets is that she never intended to complete it.  It was an ongoing work of art, a conceptual work, she thought, very loosely based on something Joseph Beuys once did, only without the thought or effort.  It wasn’t her only art project, but it’s the only one she would talk about with relative strangers.  And in New York, at this point in the century, everyone was a stranger.

She’d taken recently to observing hats.  There was something about heads that simply appealed to her, her own head, other heads, stranger’s heads.  She sometimes liked to spend time in the lobbies of New York business hotels counting hats.  She would collect data irregularly, with no scientific methodology, in order to develop her own unscientific theories.  But lately she was becoming convinced that hats were indeed coming back, and that she was onto something with this.  She would pretend to be arranging her hair, counting hats, and the days would go by with numbers in her head.

Whenever she lost count, of her own hair, or the hats, it was as if the world had suddenly gone flat.  It felt like the end of a Jim Carroll poem, where things that are simple take on enormous meaning, and things that are heavy become slightly more than absurd.  In the end, though, things would all work out exactly as they should work out. The days were never made nor broken by losing count, but it was only a temporary setback in a long project that would begin to resemble a life.  Back in her studio, with the seven busts of angry goth angels in process, it did indeed resemble a life.

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Healthcare Complaint Management

On January 7, 2010, in Health, by laura
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What is the complaint culture like in your healthcare organization?  Leadership should be focused on the patient‘s best outcome.  There should not be a blame culture associated with complaints as this may impact patient care.  Complaints made within the healthcare institution have traditionally been viewed as negative.  However when they are put in the context of patient quality then the outcome is more favorable.

Building a positive patient complaint culture takes time.  The negative view of patient complaints should be replaced by a positive air.  The benefits to the institution include patient loyalty, improvements in quality, and lowered costs.

Physicians should be directly involved in complaints and by listening and acting on the input will put your organization in better stead for receiving patient referrals.  This will improve relationships with admitting physicians and improve the inpatient admission statistics including increased occupancy rates, and positive financial results.  Often healthcare complaint management software is used to control the process.

 

Manhattan Diners

On January 7, 2010, in Travel, by laura
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There’s something about a good restaurant that gives it an instant iconicity, something that few places can ever do.  There are plenty of moments, and very important, life-changing moments at that, that come and go without announcing themselves.  Later, you remember how essential this moment was, and the place it happened begins to grow in the halls of memory and start to resemble a shrine, or a museum.  But there are moments when the place stands out so clearly that you know you’ll always remember it.  It happens in the best restaurants, Manhattan of course being the easiest place to find these, because after all, it is the official and unofficial center of the world for so many things.

One of the most attractive things about Manhattan is that it has that kind of always already celebrity status among places in the world.  But it’s still entirely possible to have an extraordinarily down to earth moment, one that is only possible if people are free to create a moment out of humble materials in a humble life.  When a moment is coming, we all sense it happening, and this is one of the reasons why we love New York.  It’s the only place in the world where you can live as if you’re being watched every moment, and also where you can live as though the camera just turned off, also every moment.  It happens in fine restaurants, and it also happens in diners.

Diners might have that iconic appeal more than anything in the world, and maybe it’s because you always have a sense that if the world ended here, it would be ok.  There are plenty of interesting people to talk to, no one’s too proud, and there are people who can bring you food.  Some of the best conversations on television happen in diners, and the best scenes in film happen in restaurants.  Godard’s Masculine/Feminine opens in a restaurant, and although the characters may not recognize that they’re entering into the pivotal moments of their lives, we certainly do, and we end up staying in that certain purgatory, wondering what might happen in that empty space right after we’ve ordered.

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