Can I Graduate?

Did you know I’m playing weekly at Little Ways in SoHo? Come grab a post-happy hour bite, this THURSDAY guest DJ TIKA AFTER DARK will be joining me for some dance generating selections!

I’m a few moments away from finally getting part of my degree, a mini graduation if you will. It’s certainly a milestone, but considering I’m registered to continue in the fall, it just feels like a pause and a piece of paper.

“SHH!” I say to my demons, “you started this journey in the early 2000s when you took the bus in every weekend for Saturday pre college classes, on top of full time school, part time work, and the expectations of a teenage girl in an Italian American household (chores, emotional labor, mediating everyone else’s follies amidst your own)!“

Like many other women, I struggle to celebrate myself, my achievements, my milestones, and my skills. Humility keeps you safer from the anti-aircraft missiles that everyone lobs at women who would seek to fly (until it doesn’t). One foot on the ground makes for a softer landing, less hurt, though first and foremost it keeps you from soaring.

How do we reconcile the hurt and the harm, both historic and current, without reconciliation itself? When people discard you in your dark times, never looking back, what is even there to reconcile with? We are going to have to face this, eventually, even if our tormentors won’t.

What can you do but continue to be human and hope that everyone comes home to their own humanity with your insistence? Getting mad is one course of action, but they’re not missing you in their life, so why would they care that you’re mad or sad?

Be happy then! While wielding the mad, while channelling the sad. I will do my best, I hope you will, too.😤

LATEST WORK: 😎

NEXT TVB WILL BE ANNOUNCED SOON🥂

For now you can listen to the live mix from CLUB NIGHT, with me playing solo for a bit and then b2b with Big Andy. On the TVB Mixcloud homepage, you can also check out our guest DJ showcases and mixes from past events.

It’s full of 90s and 00s classics mixed in with some modern stuff that fits that specific flavor. It was a super fun night, with dancing, friends, and family, plus we donated some of our fees to The Sameer Project’s Refaat Alareer camp fundraiser—what we call the PARTYTITHE.

By adding an element of community reinvestment, mutual aid, or care to our events, we are demonstrating that we are not immune to—or ignoring—the extreme dichotomy of being able to gather, dance and socialize while others are not able to eat.

We pay the party tithe because we are still paying attention, and we dare to hope for the end of suffering, we dare to dance.

INFLUENCED: Buying Insights 📲

Little City Brewing Vermouth + Soda

Low ABV is the move, has been the move, is how I enjoy beverages socially without making myself sick(er). As a former hospitality pro, I want tasty drinks, and beer and wine are not the only low ABV and delicious choices that exist, but the price is not always right, nor is the taste.

Ordering a vermouth and soda is a flex—you have to have a few pillars in place to be able to confidently order this drink.

1. Vermouth is an aperitif, and should not be priced the same as a pour of strong liquor. 2. Vermouth can be disgusting and also left open too long, so you have to be sure you’re getting your product fresh and high quality.

This RTD by Little City Vermouth bypasses these challenges cleanly, for an herbal, gently spiced and smooth tasting bev that’s refreshing and light.

7/10 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿

EEEEvents

Check out these fun events in NYC and beyond!

Links to Love 💕 or Hate 🫀

I always wondered why “working at night” was discounted so heavily by society. There’s fewer trains, less to eat, WAY less to do besides drinks and clubs, and people just kind of forget about everyone that is making the shadow of the moon operate, especially in a big city like NYC. Take the concept of ‘clubbing’ at all, which could happen at any time of the day, but thanks to our still-puritanical social constructs, happens mostly at night--unless it’s summer. I love this article because it seeks to probe the idea itself in new and exciting ways to look at the why.

Why is dancing medicine, why is community so important? Why does loud music hit those notes of our brain that we can’t explain or illustrate in other ways? We deserve to know more about these concepts outside of their service to commerce and capitalism. Science should be studying ‘the club’. 💋

On that note…get off your phone! Stop talking! DANCE I SAY!

Now I’m on the other side of this equation, behind the decks tinkering and toiling to try to trick you into wiggling your hips. It often works, but there’s this ‘waiting’ that happens, where nobody wants to be the first except the most liberated or open minded who simply are dancing to dance. Trying to rebuild a bit of the magic of the 2010s in the LES is a big goal, but I know I’m not the only one that misses walking into a shortlist of downtown bars and getting to dance from 10p-4a with no door, no 120$ tickets, no Bushwick ubers, and no shame or cringe. ☄️

It’s more than meeting online, it’s how we are quantified by our resume, our Instagram profile, our follower count, our job title. We used to complain about people that did things this way, and then we all just started to comply. Why look around at the unknown when you could have a curated profile to crush on? The Hot People Conveyor Belt includes not only the hot but the rich, the influential, the famous or quasi famous, but it’s still a system that exists around you, prescribing your choices whether you know you’re living inside the app or not. ⚡️

Great piece by a fellow newsletter creator, who deserves a lot of credit for writing these pieces on their own, when this is absolutely paid critic territory. Nostalgia is not meaningless, but it’s becoming cheap if not handled with care. The glut of re-dos in the past 5-6 years is just that: a glut. It’s near disgusting. It speaks to the refusal to invest in new ideas, and the societal forces behind that refusal.

DJ SCHEDULE

• THURSDAY MAY 8 with TIKA AFTER DARK at Little Ways

• THURSDAYS in MAY 8p-late: big ++ bad (Andy + me!) at Little Ways

• NEXT TVB to be announced soon!

• More music on Mixcloud

Ciao amici 😘😘