Archive for July, 2013

Hiatus schmiatus, I’m busy, people! I know you are too using all of your Ultimate Reward Points to hop on bikes covered in CitiBank logos. That’s CitiBank, which took 300 billion of our dollars and turned around, kicked out untold numbers of local business by putting up zillions of unnecessary ATMs and bank branches, and has now turned simple bike rides into ads for the bank that owes us 300 billion dollars. Welcome to New York Citi! And why not cool down after your ride with a Sprite-flavored “lite” Slurpee from anyone of the dozens of 7-Elevens in Manhattan now, and many more on the way?

While most of us are updating about the latest cupcake store, some of us are actually doing something about the Mallification of Manhattan.

So in tonight’s don’t-make-me-say-it-again, I get real about what happens when you add 7-11 to the East Village. Goodbye Capital of Counterculture and hello just-another-counter to self-serve your Slurpee.

Get the 411 on 7-Eleven’s plans to “Pringle-ize” the East Village with truthiness and Foodiness™ when I give the ultimate non-Kool-Aid interview with NO 7-11 NYC’s Bob Holman and Dr. Rob Hollander on 7-Eleven Is To The East Village What Pringles Are To Potatoes, airing tonight.

…and while you’re at it, get off the couch at go become a “friend” of NO-711 NYC and follow them on Twitter. You should also follow EV Grieve and Vanishing New York, both of which are doing the real journalistic dirty work on the Pringle-ization of New York City. Actually, you don’t have to get off the couch to do something! That’s the beauty of “social” media – you can be a lazy f**k and still be an activist!

It’s Summer time, which means it’s time for scrumptious 2 dollar boxes of blueberries from the fruit cart, 12 dollar melons from the Farmer’s Market, and 22 dollar organic watermelons from Foragers. Life is good! Yes, the blueberries are covered in toxic pesticides, yes it took 45 minutes to get to the Farmer’s Market, and yes you could have bought a bag of weed and fruit from the cart with that 22 dollars and had some real fun (and not care about the pesticides). But the point is that you want to eat fruit that came out of the ground and not lite, watermelon, blueberry-flavored Slurpees from the third 7-Eleven that just opened up around the corner. Let’s face it: life isn’t good. Foodiness™ makes it hard!

So in tonight’s Rerun Amok — You Can’t Have A Proustian Fruit Moment With A Grape Gummy — I get real about what foodiness has done to fruit; how, whether it’s poisoned pears and tasteless tangerines or fat-free fruit Go-Gurts and blueberry-colored flavor-dots, you can’t trust fruit (see Napoleon, Larry Craig, Tom Cruise); how we’re so far down the foodiness™ rabbit hole with fruit that children today don’t have a Proustian first-time with fruit anymore, but rather with fruit-flavored Gummy Bears and strawberry colored Swedish Fish; how phony “fruit” facsimiles lead to facsimiles across the board (see Auto-Tune replacing voices, reality shows replacing reality, Tweeting replacing experiences); and how to get real, which is to eat fruit over an oat-bran protein fruit bar and an organic apple over a toxic apple, and to just accept that when it comes to fruit, it’s pretty f*ed…but at least you had an unforgettable childhood first-fruit experience, and can pronounce “Proust.”

So if you don’t want to eat shit and you do want to justify spending money on fruit instead of weed, tune in!