Hasta La Gadget!

I planted the seed… and I was hoping that our trip to El Barrio would make Nici and Bryce get a little more interested in our culture. A few days after our road trip, I got a call from Jennifer (the kids’ mom and Capicu Culture’s administrator) thanking me for taking the kids to El Barrio. She told me that the kids came back excited about all the things they learned about Puerto Rican culture and now wanted to find out more about their Costa Rican roots. I then thought maybe another road trip was in order. So I extended an invitation for a mid afternoon trip to another historically Latino neighborhood in NYC, the Lower East Side, or “Loisaida” in Spanglish, a nickname coined by a local Nuyorican poet Bimbo Rivas.

Like El Barrio, Loisaida was an extension of Puerto Rico in NYC. Where El Barrio was a place that really influenced political change, Loisaida flourished in the arts becoming a mecca for poets worldwide when The Nuyorican Poets Cafe was founded in a small apartment of writer and poet Miguel Algarin with the assistance of his friends Miguel Pinero, Bimbo Rivas and Lucky Cienfuegos.

Between 1975 and 1980, the Nuyorican audience grew to the point where Miguel Algarin was forced to move it several times eventually ending up at its current home on 236 East 3rd Street. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe was a garden that cultivated literary greats such as founders Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero and Lucky Cienfuegos. Jorge Brandon aka El Coco que Habla, Sandra María Esteves, Pedro Pietri, Bimbo Rivas, Victor Hernández Cruz, Tato Laviera, Piri Thomas, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, José Angel Figueroa, Nancy Mercado and Martn Espada. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is also the inspiration behind the cultural showcase I co-founded with my business partner Juan “Paposwiggity” Santiago called Capicu Cultural Showcase.

Speaking of gardens… thanks to a local housing worker, we had an opportunity to visit La Casita Los Amigos or Los Amigos Garden, a Boricua oasis in this urban landscape that features a Puerto Rican style house and serves as a community “backyard” to host all kinds of events to celebrate our culture via music, art, spoken word and our culinary traditions. The garden has a beautiful mural by local artist Chico depicting El Morro overlooking the Caribbean as a reminder of how we should continue to defend our cultural legacy here in NYC.

Just like El Barrio, I was inspired by the interest both Nici and Bryce demonstrated as we traveled thru the neighborhood talking about the history of Loisaida. I encourage each of you to invite some young people to explore your personal landmarks that shaped your life.

Want to know more about the Latino history of NYC? Feel free to follow me, @UrbanJibaro on Twitter or visit my websitehttp://www.SofritoForYourSoul.com

On Kawara, the 81-year-old Japanese painter and conceptual artist whose fascination with human mortality was legend, has died, The Huffington Post has learned.

The news — first circulated on Twitter — was confirmed by a representative of the David Zwirner Gallery. The gallery has represented the artist since 1999.

Born in Japan, Kawara first exhibited in Tokyo in the early 1950s. Though he became known for his riddle-like abstractions, he started out quite differently. He was a teenager during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his early work — much of which he destroyed — reflected the grotesque imagery of that time, incorporating drawings of amputees and body parts.

Onlookers marvel at the ‘Reading One Million Years’ art installation by Japanist artist On Kawara on March 30, 2004 in Trafalgar Square, London. For seven hours a day from 8am yesterday, several pairs of men and women will sit in this box and read from two printed lists of years from 998,031BC to AD1969 – the year Kawara conceived the idea – and AD1980 to AD 1,001,980. Working flat out, it is predicted the British team will only read around 217,000 years. (Photo by Bruno Vincent/Getty Images, Caption by Getty)

Kawara’s later work concerned time and space in relation to human existence. His most famous project, the Today Series, is designed to end the day he does. The series of conceptual paintings is guided by rules, invented by Kawara. Each canvas is marked only with the date of creation, written in the language and conventions of the country in which it was painted. The first in the series was painted in New York, the city Kawara eventually called home.

A single canvas took the artist a full day to complete, and always included four or five coats of a single brand of paint. The lettering, always hand-painted, is in white and placed in a consistent way, whatever the canvas size.

As in much of Kawara’s later work, the series was both humanist and clinical. While the paintings were constructed according to preset guidelines, they could also stir unique feelings in a viewer. An essay at the website of Phaidon Press, a publisher of Kawara’s work, compares the trick to a Zen koan question, “a puzzle without a solution”:

“The date paintings are clinically objective until you happen upon one that depicts the date of your wedding or the birth of your child, at which point it suddenly turns personal and evocative.”

Equally, the emphasis is on the state of Kawara’s existence at the time of painting, and on the nature of existence more generally. Painted dates signify a day Kawara was alive. Days without a painting attached present a riddle: What was he exactly?

Writing in a catalogue for an exhibit at David Zwirner Gallery last year, the Japanese author Lei Yamabe calls this unknown state “the flickering between life and death.”

“The series will be complete when Kawara’s body ceases to exist,” she writes, “when superposition finally collapses completely and Kawara has entered the irreversible phase of ‘death.’”

“On Kawara — Silence” is set to go on view at the Guggenheim in New York next year.

Baby boomers… do you trust yourself?

Do you trust your instincts?

If you made a life altering decision today do you honestly believe you would be successful?

That’s a very tough question isn’t it?

Almost as tough as having complete and absolute trust in yourself.

I have found that very few people have it.

I found out that I am one of them.

Let me explain.

Anyone who has followed my mission to find my true passion in life knows that the best thing that could possibly happen to me occurred on January 5, 2012.

It was that day that I was. as I like to say, “unceremoniously kicked to the curb” by the Fortune 500 company I was working for “like an unwanted piece of old furniture.”

It was later that day that I vowed to myself to begin a new path to a better and more satisfying life.

It took me a couple of weeks to develop the courage to do that and convince myself that I could be successful without having a nice, secure, cushy, 6 figure middle management job as the basis of my personal identity.

I thought, for the time, that I trusted myself.

But, last year when I first published this particular blog (yes, I am re-purposing an old blog but shame on you for not noticing) the winds of fate blew across my life.

I found myself employed in the corporate world… again.

Ironically, working for an outsourcing company that was contracted by the very same company that fired me.

I convinced myself that this job was different than my previous one.

I promised (myself and my followers) it would not interfere with my focus to carry on with my plans to stay engaged with my Survive55 priorities.

I convinced myself that this new opportunity afforded me everything I was looking for in a job:

• A chance build a bigger “fun bucks” retirement fund for myself and my grandkids
• A chance to build a whole new circle of professional relationships
• A chance to put another “success” stamp on my career resume (nobody likes their last at bat to be a pop-up)

and

• A chance to even exact a little vindication from the outcome of my previous position.

How sweet is that?

Luckily, the company’s contract was rescinded and my employment only last 60 days.

But, during that time I let that job interfere with my blogging.

During that time, I let this job control my priorities.

During this time, I lost confidence in myself that I could be successful, on my own, outside of the corporate world.

“Sometimes life gets in the way of living.”

Again, it took me a couple of weeks to convince myself that I could be successful without having a nice, secure, cushy, 6 figure middle management job as the basis of my personal identity.

Once again, I thought, for the time, that I trusted myself.

I threw myself back into my Survive55 “passion” convincing myself that I was now ready to make an honest go of it.

Well, my story doesn’t end there folks.

Tomorrow, I officially quit my job.

What?

What job?

Let me back up a bit.

While working for this outsourcing company I did “develop a new circle of professional relationships” and this led to another offer to work for a local company in the same industry.

Even more ironically, this company was a distributor for the Fortune 500 company that originally fired me.

Could this be karma knocking again?

So, in March I began working for this company.

I do want to add that it took several months of hard negotiation with the owner (and myself) before I decided to try the corporate world again.

Obviously, I had trust issues in myself.

Fortunately, it only took me about 90 days to realize that I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t keep pretending to myself that I could follow my priorities while trying to sustain the security blanket of a salaried corporate job.

So, I quit.

That’s right, I quit.

This time, I quit the corporate world and not the other way around.

Yes, that means that I no longer have a corporate identity to impress people with.

Yes, that means I don’t know where my next paycheck is coming from.

Yes, that means that I am going to have to really tighten my belt and watch every penny.

Does this mean that I really and truly want to follow my passion and build my future financial empire on my own?

Do I finally trust myself?

What do you think?

I guess what I am preaching to you is that:

Even though the immediate future may seem frightening and intimidating when you decide to jump off the “rat race” treadmill and begin really focusing on what is important for your life, fate will supply a soft cushion for you to land on and will offer up many roads to choose from that will lead you to your true success in life.

Trust me in what I am saying but more importantly trust yourself.

But don’t wait too long.

Hopefully, nobody comes along next week and offers me a really nice, secure, cushy, 6 figure, middle management job.

Just kidding?

I want to send huge Thanks to a good friend and avid Survive 55 follower Deborah Kay Brown for having the incredibly good timing to send me an email with the video below.

It had to be karma.

It came at precisely the right time to keep me from losing focus and drifting off into old, careless habits again.

We don’t have that many jelly beans left.

Use them wisely.

Plenty of us would rather pass a homeless person by than offer a helping hand. But there is also a large portion of the population that is just as willing to harm someone living on the streets because they are too compromised to fight back.

It’s a harsh reality that YouTube prankster Yousef Saleh Erakat has made abundantly clear in a recent Internet stunt.

Erakat, the guy who once kneeled over in skintight yoga pants to show men just how quick they are to objectify anyone wearing revealing clothing, has taken a more sober approach to his social experiments as of late.

In the “Kanye West Yeezys Experiment,” Erakat poses as a homeless man napping in a sleeping bag, and leaves out a pair of red Nike Air Kanye West Yeezy sneakers — which have a resale value of $5,000 — to see if passersby would nab them.

A number of people grabbed the sneakers without hesitating, while a few hovered around the scene deliberating before trying to snatch the shoes.

After confronting the “thieves,” Erakat learned that some of them felt that it’s simple to justify stealing from a homeless person.

One man figured Erakat had stolen the shoes, so it was OK for him to swipe them too. Another said he would use the money for college and Erakat was likely just going to spend whatever money he’d make on the shoes on alcohol or a “fifth of Jack.”

But it isn’t just petty crimes for which homeless people are at risk.

People living on the streets experienced a 23 percent surge in targeted attacks last year as compared to the number of assaults in 2012, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Michael Stoops, the group’s director of community organizing, believes that a number of factors have contributed to the increase in violence against homeless people.

Attackers are now posting their crimes on social media, giving other people “inspiration” to do the same.

Politicians are at fault, too, according to Stoops, since so many cities continue to pass laws — including homeless feeding bans — that demonize homeless people, making it easy to justify putting them in harm’s way.

“Cities continue to crack down on the homeless population,” Stoops told The Huffington Post, “by enforcing laws and creating a hostile attitude toward the homeless population.”

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Apparently, if you’re still craving Cronuts and tweeting about it, you’re part of the 1% of netizens that still care. The rest have moved onto ramen-crusted chicken wings and grilled cheese sandwiches — the next unspoiled “foodie” territory being conquered.

How did we come to such a pretentious conclusion? We got word of a new tool dubbed Microsoft Social Listening, which pings Facebook, Twitter and blogs (sites with a url) for buzzwords in order to determine what’s trending on the internet. Sentiment for a food term is graded by keywords within an article and headlines, ranging from “positive” words like delicious and wonderful to “negative” words like bland and overrated to grade overall opinion.

However, our dataset was limited to the food terms we chose to rate against each other, rather than all food terms in internet existence. That being said, we plugged in terms we talk about a lot on Foodbeast:  ramen, kale, juicing, french press, croissant donut, poutine, grilled cheese, sriracha, and kimchi. We let the fancy technology run the numbers from June 1, 2014 to June 30, 2014 and in the end, this is what we got:

Foods with the most “Share of Voice,” aka the one’s being talked about the most:

From highest to lowest:

1. Ramen

2. Kale

3. Grilled Cheese

4. Juicing

5. Kimchi

6. Poutine, Sriracha (Tied)

7. French Press

8. Cronut Croissant Donut

 _______

Foods with the highest “Sentiment,” aka the one’s with the most positve “feels”

From highest to lowest:

1. Juicing

2. Kale

3. Croissant Donut

4. Poutine, Ramen (Tied)

5. Kimchi

6. Sriracha

7. French Press

8. Grilled Cheese

_______

Note, while “Grilled Cheese” was one of the top foods being talked about, it’s sentiment was the lowest — the most negative — on the list. Which leads us to think… people must be mad hating on that cheesy, melty goodness.

Peek the infographic for more slick nuances and let us know what you discover in the comments.