Belur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar 1938

B.K.S. Iyengar is the founder of Iyengar Yoga....amazing video footage from 1938.

Funny

Brooklyn Flea & GQ

My handsome hubby Fabio a.k.a. Aaron was scouted at the Brooklyn Flea by GQ Magazine to be one of their jean models for an article coming out soon...I don't think he is very interested. They made him "turn around" for one of the spec shots...

Hey Karen....I knew it....RADIAC

From the GOWANUS LOUNGE:

The story of Williamsburg's Radiac Research Corporation is not a new one. The firm, which is on Kent Avenue, operates as a transfer station for low-level radioactive waste and hazardous chemicals, and has had its share of publicity, including a campaign to shut it down. Yet, it is still there, and the threat it presents in the case of an accident, fire or act of terrorism is sobering especially with thousands of new residents moving in nearby over the next two or three years.

Here's some verbiage from a document prepared by the Rezoning Task Force of Community Board 1 during the Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning debate in 2005:

Radiac, at Kent Avenue and S. 1st Street, serves as a transfer station for both hazardous chemicals and low-level radioactive waste. Because of the spatial inadequacies of the footprint of the facility, Radiac often operates with its doors open during loading/unloading of hazardous chemical and radioactive waste. A Molotov cocktail or a gunshot could set off a calamitous event. Engine Co. 212 was located ten blocks from Radiac and could have handled a fire rapidly enough to prevent a meltdown of the low-level nuclear waste (the EPA standard of cleanup of Radioactive events could lead to a 50-year evacuation and quarantine of Williamsburg and parts of Manhattan or Queens, depending on wind direction). This one facility stores up to critical mass of radioactive waste and flammable liquids, reactives, oxidizers, and explosives (up to 15,000 total gallons of hazardous chemical waste)...

If that's not enough to make a bite of lunch go down your windpipe, here's a bit more background color from an article in Block Magazine a while back:

That inventory, and charges that Radiac has been lax in the care and security of the chemicals, has residents and neighborhood activists pining for a relocation of the business to a less densely populated area. An accident in Radiac could easily trigger one of the worst environmental disasters New York City has ever seen, says Sean Nagle, the health and research director of activist organization El Puente’s Community Health and Education Institute...

We won't even get into the fact that there is nothing--utterly and absolutely nothing other than fate--to stop someone with evil intent from taking advantage of the situation, even if it has been somewhat mitigated. The horrifying possibilities aside, no one that we know of has collected any health data on the facility's neighbors, but it would be interesting to know whether there was any spike in cancers or other illnesses during the 25 years that Radiac has operated.It should be noted that Radiac is now a "10-day transfer facility," meaning that it no longer stores was for up to a year and that they are no longer allowed to store "incompatible chemicals" such as cyanide and acid. However, if you want to see what happened when vbs.tv went by with a geiger counter, click here. One community leaders told GL that "The community has let Radiac slip off the radar since they announced changes in what they would handle and for how long."

Radiac remains relevant as residential developments like Northside Piers, The Edge, 184 Kent and the housing that will likely go on the old Domino Plant site sprout nearby.

CBS Shoot

Producer Adam D. on the left.

Aaron and I worked another CBS promotional shoot on Monday. It was super fun. I was in charge of wardrobe (don't the girls look fabulous?), and Aaron was the Art Department - Props (see all those shopping bags they are carrying???). Anyway it was shot in the trendy meat-packing district, right in front of Diane Von Furstenberg's store (and Diane herself actually showed in a dark green Bentley (well...she had a driver).

(I dropped my first lint roller in the dirtiest most disgusting puddle...it looked so sad lying there...)

The girl next to me in black is Hair & Makeup

Diane's Bentley

Dog Walking Zen

I just found this organization called BARC literally blocks from my home. They allow the public to walk the shelter dogs from 9am-1pm and then 5pm-8pm Tues - Sat...it is so much fun! So far I have walked a young Pit Bull named Ruffles who took a shining to Aaron...and I walked an old little muffin called Diego. This is part of our nightly thing now...walking these dogs...it's great. Some more info below on this fabulous organization.

http://www.barcshelter.org/home/index.html

The BARC Shelter always needs financial support to help us help homeless dogs, cats, and other pets. Donations go toward the cost of food, board, vet exams, toys, litter, toys, leashes, collars, training crates, etc. Unless specified under one of the categories listed on this page, a donation is considered unrestricted and undesignated.

The Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition (BARC) is a 501c3 not-for-profit, no-kill, privately funded animal shelter, located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Established in 1987, BARC receives no subsides from the city, state, or federal government. We meet the needs of homeless animals through the assistance of dedicated volunteers, revenues generated from the success of our pet supply business, and from private donations from people like you.

The Anxiety of the Middle Class New Yorker

By Adam Bonislawski

Perhaps it’s just the vestigial influence of my suburban upbringing, but I’ve always felt slightly ridiculous living in New York.

My immigrant forebears arrived here 100 years ago and got the hell out as soon as they could. A century later, I moved back and presently find myself — after five years of fairly constant striving — with some modest savings, a handful of steady freelance gigs and the lease to a reasonably well-priced studio in a rapidly gentrifying outer-borough neighborhood off one of the city’s more notoriously temperamental subway lines. Personally, I’m delighted with the situation, but I’m not sure my ancestors would see this as progress.

To come to New York intending to make great gobs of money on Wall Street is one thing. To come to New York intending to eke out a quiet existence in some more moderately remunerative field (say, journalism) is quite another. The former makes perfectly good sense. Getting rich is a proud area tradition dating back at least to the days of Peter Minuit. The latter, however, is a nakedly bizarre pursuit requiring something in the way of explanation. Being middle class in today’s New York is like swimming the English Channel or climbing Everest without oxygen, or translating the Bible into LOLcats. Sure, it can be done, but is it really worth the effort? A city where the average apartment runs around $800,000 is not a place for those of modest means. In other words, shouldn’t you just move to Austin already?

People have their reasons, of course. Some are here to make art and live within the sort of large community of likeminded folks that exists in few (if any) other places in the country. Some are here to press themselves upon any one of the various industries the city dominates. Some are here because they came for college and now can’t bear the thought of not being able to get sushi at two in the morning. Some (myself) just really like to look at tall buildings.

In any case, it’s an enterprise that rests by and large upon a certain assumption of privilege. That a person feels able to spend their time scraping by in New York City is a sign that, in all likelihood, the demands of sheer material necessity aren’t pulling too strongly upon them. In fact, for such a materialistic town, there’s something curiously post-materialist about middle-class life as it’s lived in New York. If it’s stuff that you’re after you could almost surely do better somewhere else. For the same price as a decent studio in a Murray Hill co-op, you could buy a fully tricked out three-bedroom in a nice Dallas suburb. For the monthly rent on an Upper West Side one-bedroom, you could swing the lease on a new BMW and a sprawling home in one of Atlanta’s best neighborhoods. The decision to live in New York on $45,000 a year entails a sort of chosen asceticism. In the rest of the country a 32-year-old with roommates is a genuine oddity. Here you’ll find one around every corner.

What nags is the question of authenticity. Not authenticity in your traditional existential sense, but in the sense that, looking around New York, comparing the way life is lived here with the way it’s lived elsewhere, considering the relative inconvenience and difficulty of it all, you begin to wonder if you haven’t, perhaps, misread the situation; if the city you’ve been pretending to all this time isn’t actually real but just some anachronism you’ve taken from an old John Cheever story (and even Cheever eventually split for the suburbs).

When I was eight years old my family took a trip to Disney World. I came back wanting nothing more than to live out the rest of my natural life in Epcot’s faux-Viking village. In my more pessimistic moments, the notion of a New York middle class seems to me much the same sort of fantasy. There’s simply something unnatural about the idea, something unsustainable. There’s the bothersome sense that history, entropy, are flowing against you.
Which is not at all to recommend against sticking it out, but simply to highlight the somewhat gloomy backdrop looming behind the gallery openings, the dinner parties, the skyline views, the strolls in the park. At the end of the day, it’s all a very tenuous business. And barring sudden and dramatic changes in the wage structure of your typical corporation, or an utter collapse of the city’s real estate market, eventually many of us are going to have to leave.

Some won’t, of course. The hardcore bohemians will hunker down in Bushwick or the South Bronx or whatever neighborhood is next in line to be pioneered. Your more bourgeois diehards might take the ferry to Staten Island and cling to the city from across the harbor. Here and there a writer might hit it big with a book contract and plow their advance into renovating a brownstone in Sunset Park. Some tech company’s in-house yoga instructor could reap an unexpected windfall when their stock options vest. Bond traders will need spouses and galleryists will become real estate agents and young teachers will leave the classroom for law school and perhaps even an odd bartender or two will see their dreams of minor movie stardom come true. Who knows what might happen? Just last month a struggling novelist snagged an Upper East Side studio for $14,000 through a city housing lottery.

That’s the thing, though. It could all work out, but there’s no particularly good reason to think that it will. Most places, putting together a middle-class life is, if not exactly easy, at least a fairly ordinary accomplishment. You get a decent job, buy a modest house, start a college fund, send your kids to public school, etc. If nothing else, you have the illusion of control, a not unreasonable belief in the efficacy of your plans. In New York, unless your plan is to get rich (which, granted, as plans go, is not such a bad one), sooner or later either fortune will smile or you’ll find yourself in a moving van on the other side of the Hudson. By and large, the rest of the country is designed to let a person exist comfortably within the middle class. New York, as currently configured, essentially demands that you escape it.

The good news? When at last the time does come, you might actually be ready to get out of here anyway. A co-worker recently asked me if I’d ever been to Phoenix. Born and raised in Queens, he’d just come back from visiting a relative in Arizona.

“I don’t know, man,” he said, “It’s pretty nice out there. Quiet. Cheap. Warm all the time. For like $200,000 you can get a big house in a good neighborhood.

“Everyone’s always like, about New York — ‘I want the restaurants. I want the bars. I want the excitement.’ Yeah, sure, whatever. I’m like, ‘just give it a few years.’

“Believe me. You get over it.”