Come Dance with me This Week!

See you SATURDAY as Ti Voglio Bene RETURNS at Beverly’s in the LES!

New People: I’m Dan— 1/3 of the TVB crew. A DJ, a writer, and shitstarter. Here in this newsletter I share gigs, mixes, events, rants, product reccos/reviews, and more. You can read back issues of this newsletter by clicking through to the webpage. Rant incoming….

BUT FIRST: TVB DEETS!

It was hard to stay quiet on this lil list while I got deeper into a semester of school, and we all got deeper in the shit, but it was a necessary break.

Like many writers + artists, I needed a pause from the sale. 

If you didn’t know and couldn’t tell, your everyday reads, news, opinion or otherwise, have been absoluuuuutely infiltrated, and I mean every corner, with affiliate ads, backlinks, and other forms of monetary cooperation with interested retail parties. In some bizarre twist of fate, journalism + media at large have taken a turn for the 9th circle of hell, after hovering around a few other circles for long enough to give us hope. 

Where writers were once paid to explore a question or topic, outside of “hard news” beats, most articles, essays, or otherwise must now hold a monetary value to the publication, not just an intrinsic or artistic value. 

Even the act of getting an assignment became a hard sell, and I’ve got a decade of bylines. No more ongoing professional relationships with publications, just proof that the piece will go viral, sell lots of toasters, or cost them pennies by underpaying you. 

I just needed a break from the sale! Even talking about products or things here where no one pays me, I like felt like a spokesperson for the world’s problems. The trash, the waste, the exploitation, the misery. 

Since the only sale today is telling you about the (free) music I’ve been putting out, plus my (free to attend) DJ gigs, we’ll leave it there with the usual rant. Otherwise. I'll have to start charging 🤭.

Below find links to make you think, mixes to keep you sweating, and events to make community!

LATEST WORK:

Mixes for all kinds of days, especially BRICK ones like today!

INFLUENCED: Buying Insights 📲 

In Defense of the Diner

I have such a firm sense of place in the common diner, but the common diner is no longer a widespread, nor firm, sense of place. Like other big cultural or social changes to the way we human, it’s become a liminal space in between past and present.

Diners used to be places to smoke, drink coffee, laugh til 1 or 2 or 3am, but now we’re lucky if they’re even open for dinner, let alone past 10pm. The odd one or two are still 24 hours. Is it any wonder they’re all seemingly on the route to New Jersey from New York, or vice versa depending which way you are commuting—and for what reason?

Early morning fuel, late night lifesaver, it was the place to get it. On thick, rounded ceramic plates framed with ‘70s palette stripes, too.

I noticed this shift also at school, where we did not have food to-go my first time in the early aughts. Now, while plenty of people socialize at the tables like 20 years haven’t passed, more than a few people are taking their dining hall food in a take out bag, to the labs, to the dorms, to the benches outside.

While it’s nice to have options, between the waste and the removed social time, even the school dining hall, once a surefire place to hang with your peers, has become a liminal and evaporating social space.

8/10 silver dollar pancakes 🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞🥞

EEEEvents

Check out these fun events in NYC, the West Coast, and beyond!

Links to Love 💕 or Hate 🫀

It’s pretty hard to get to know NYC on this level, and often aside from the walking, involves copious amounts of public transportation. I have often written here about my love for walking as both a means of transportation and as a method of exploration, and it really can’t be matched. As long as it’s nice out, I’ve also complained about the cold in these pages just as much, and will try to spare you that in 2025. ✨

Even with nine or more years of scientific studies about the falsehoods of conservative media, we are where we are. According to this study, “Notably, Americans who primarily get their news from Fox News and Conservative Media and social media/other are more likely to answer questions about inflation and crime incorrectly than Americans writ large.”

Lord almighty, we needed a STUDY for this? I kid. But in all seriousness, why do we study the worst timeline more than we work to undo it? Imagine gathering this data and thinking it will do a gaddamned thing to stop the gears from grinding us down.

IDK how funny it is to everyone else how many Italian American millennials are watching The Sopranos in the 2020s after avoiding it the first time. It’s funny as hell to me, one of those people myself. We avoided it, after all, or at least I avoided it, because instead of being a tale to heed, it reinforced a lot of stereotypes inside and out of our community. Author Scrima said this poignantly of the gender politics, “they also reflect it back to the show’s viewers as a plausible reality, as something to emulate.”

Now, with some time and space between my confusing ethnic Italian American upbringing and my adulthood, watching this hits completely differently, and so do the memories of people uncritically emulating mobsters. 🤮

DJ Happenings

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Ciao ragazzi 😘😘