7 Photos That Say Farewell To Summer in the City
By Cristina Cianci
Summer is my favorite season. Long hot beach days, soccer camp, bike rides in the neighborhood, pool parties, ball games, and boardwalk strolls made up my Jersey shore summer days and nights as a kid.
Flash forward to current summers in the city. Sticking to the outdoor theme, I find myself in my mid-twenties, still hitting the New York City beaches and West Side highway strolls. Although pool parties have become park picnics (Central, Battery, you name it), baseball is still baseball—now with Shake Shack.
1. You can bet you bottom dollar I'll be at the beach for 11 of the 13 weeks of summer.
2. When time doesn't permit you to leave the island head to Tar Beach, the true New Yorker's summer spot (aka your rooftop).
3. Baseball, an American classic.
4. Crosswalk strolls.
5. Backyard BBQs
6. No time like the summertime to wander and find new hidden gardens, like this one behind Greecologies, a coffee shop in Little Italy.
7. Outdoor movies in the park…or at a museum…are a staple. This was taken after leaving Disney's “Fantasia,” which played on the big screen at The Museum of Modern Art.
Fuck You, Write
A green thermos full of ideas...no, it's just coffee...
By Dustin Hockensmith
Every day I’m losing the fight between who I am and who I wish I were.
The idealist in me thinks I should have no problem pursuing every story idea in my head. I’m also going to be the perfect parent, a loving and caring husband, a workout warrior at the peak of my physical fitness, the kind of guy who finds fame and makes a lasting impact on the world.
The reality is, I’m beaten down and just trying to last another day. I’m distracted and unhealthy. At home, I’m thinking about work. At work, I’m missing my wife and daughter. It’s a never-ending cycle of grand expectations and failures that sets a tone of helplessness in my life.
Too many projects, not enough time, and my writing has suffered tremendously. It’s a strange and challenging reality to know that my passion, my dream job, is now attached to dollars and expectations. Writing is something I would do (and am doing right now) for free, but the game keeps changing and it’s up to me to evolve.
The day-to-day grind feels like the scene in "Goodfellas," when the restaurant owner signs his life away to Paulie and finds out that there’s a cost for his protection. I’ve got a bigger audience than I ever imagined, close to seven million readers in 2014, but anything I accomplish today means far less than what I do tomorrow.
Got a lot going on at home?
Fuck you, write.
Out of ideas?
Fuck you, write.
Feeling like an uninspired blob?
Fuck you, write.
The hamster wheel is going to keep spinning, whether I’m on it or not. If motivation escapes me, my only choice is to try harder to find it.
Welcome to life in modern journalism, where the pace moves quickly and the pressures keep mounting. The model for future success remains elusive as print media dies, but the core strategy, it seems, is to produce more content with a constantly shrinking workforce.
My company, Advance Digital, made waves in the publishing world by slashing newspaper production to three days a week and investing more resources into digital content. Poof! The narrow mindset and often-outdated ideas that go into putting out a newspaper were no longer holding our newsroom staff back.
From a creative standpoint, the sky is the limit, which is insanely cool. A shift in ideals created a job for me that never existed before, and I’ve been able to shape it into whatever the hell I want, no questions asked.
I start work every single day with a blank canvas, which is a huge positive most days. But sometimes, when mired in a days-long slump, that blank canvas is a burden. Creative energy is the key to everything, and as every good writer knows, sometimes you just ain’t got it.
So what’s a writer to do when he’s running on empty? The closest thing I’ve found to a solution is to caffeine up and hope that a rapid heart rate and “artificial” energy are enough to overcome the sinking feeling that everything you write is crap. That’s just not a good place to be.
The caffeine offers hope, if only in my own head. It used to be cigarettes and weed in my younger writing days, a checkered past that included a strong start down a road toward alcoholism. But damn it, living hard also creates experiences and perspective that the righteous will simply never understand.
I’m not saying you should go out and get hooked on drugs. But if you do, just take good notes and file them under “Gold.”
I left a cozy job that paid well for a life of uncertainty that maybe, just maybe, included a chance to pursue a passion I never knew I had. I thought blogging was my future—that a career in print media was a perfect Plan B…in 2007…inarguably the worst time in the history of journalism to be starting on the ground floor.
As I kicked old habits, namely the constant weed funk that in no way helped my writing career, I found new ones. I drink coffee out of a thermos now, an ugly green monstrosity that gives a faint illusion that I’m not a delicate, white-collared pussy. I actively avoid communicating with others. I eat as much in one sitting as a Rwandan villager eats in a lifetime.
I am who I am, and I love what I do. When it’s hard to keep those things in perspective, I'm learning that maybe it’s better to take a breather than try to throw more work at the same, tired problem.
But when all else fails, when that option doesn’t exist, crush four pots of black coffee and tell the outside world, “Fuck you, I’m writing.”
Dustin Hockensmith is a sports reporter for PennLive.com and a radio host for the Keystone Sports Network. Follow him on Twitter @dhockensmith.
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Song Writing 101: Coffee and Lyrics
By Anton Laplume
Song writing.
Song writing for me is the equivalent of writing in your diary or journal. It’s a way to document a certain frame of mind of when a song is written. Expressing your feelings towards any given situation. Whether it’s love lost, love gained, being broke or having an excess amount of money, the separation of those you grew up with designated by life’s process, or the new bonds you form in your progression through this crazy world, there’s plenty of inspiration to grab from.
Sometimes it comes in the form of just music without lyrics because sometimes just the music is enough to get the point across. Other times the music is simply two or three chords but the lyrics have a much deeper meaning. That’s the great thing about music and art in general, there are options, and so many different ways to explore them; and beyond the art, there’s a discipline gained from working within certain creative boundaries to express concepts that are seemingly untethered by logic.
However, everyone has their process.
For me, it usually starts off with a large cup of coffee and some kind of turbulence in my life. When something happens, either good or bad, that kind of rearranges my thought process and has me questioning the way I’ve been doing things, I’ll hide out in the organized chaos of my work space and just start to play. As the playing continues, a vocal concept will kind of just come to fruition and before I know it, there’s a concept for a verse or chorus.
Now we come to the lyrics (entering large cup of coffee), which can be a frustrating process. As I would imagine it for most writers, I am very particular about the words I use. From the amount of syllables a word may have, to the way it flows with the surrounding words. What kind of rhyming scheme do I want (If any at all)?. What part of the beat am I placing a word on? And how do I want to finish a phrase? Both rhythmically and harmonically speaking. That’s where those creative boundaries come into play.
The following is usually the final part of the skeleton and the bane of my existence… the bridge. The bridge of any song generally comes in a little more than half way through and offers a bit of relief or change from the songs main idea (verses and choruses). When I write a bridge, I’ll try to change the key center of the song, maybe change up the rhythmic pattern a bit, which can be difficult at times. The reason being, is that sometimes you’re just not hearing a change or a new section to add. Maybe you’re having a hard time coming up with a smooth transition (once again, those creative boundaries). And it’s okay to not have a bridge sometimes, but it is important as a musician to challenge yourself to come up with an idea, even if you’re not particularly hearing one.
That’s where the discipline comes into play. Because to just abandoned the bridge because of the lack of ideas is not only preventing the possibility of a great concept, but also denying yourself a process of learning which can only benefit you. Either way, a lot of the time this ends up being the downfall to a lot of my material. Halting the process of writing to the point where the song is just another unfinished idea in the musical wasteland of my brain.
But in the event that I do successfully finish the songs structure, I will then introduce it to whoever I am playing with, and we add on the final touches to make the song complete. For me, once a song is finished, nothing gives me a greater sense of accomplishment or feeling of relief. At least for a short period of time, then I have to start the whole process over again.
The beauty of whole thing is that every time it’s a little different, and every time, the end result is just as satisfying.
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