PicoBlog

When I started scouting cities for our Italy move a few years ago, my first trip was to Milan. My close friend Marc, who owns a fantastic restaurant in Geneva called Bombar, told me he'd fly down and show me his favorite things in the city. Most importantly, he wanted to take me to a small and storied restaurant that was not only a neighborhood mainstay but a global food lovers "

Hello and welcome to REPLY ALT. I’ve picked up a lot of new subscribers recently who found me through my posts about art critic Jerry Saltz’s weird coffee habits/performance art. While I cannot resist my duty to do coffee journalism when I am called upon, REPLY ALT is actually more of a newsletter about music, believe it or not. So unless someone shines the Folgers logo over the city of Gotham, I will now resume my work as a mild-mannered music writer.

I have a lot to report on this week, including Basic Bird’s upcoming opening, as well as quite a few tidbits about new/upcoming/recently opened restaurants. If you like this post, don’t forget to subscribe and share! Thanks. Let’s start with …. ncG1vNJzZmivmaO2rrvRmqWvoZyhsm%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xop2iZXZu2s7%2FTZqOop5titq%2B%2FyJ2cZpqRqLakecGiqZ1ln6m1pr4%3D

“A Fish in the Bathtub” is a lovely little film, another tidy gem from writer/director Joan Micklin Silver, whose oeuvre I’ve been gradually working my way through. Last column I took a look at a film directed by her husband, Raphael Silver, which she produced in a long your turn/my turn collaboration. Here they switched hats again, with him producing and also sharing screenwriting duties with John Silverstein and David Chudnovsky.

Source: Pexels/Gustavo BringI will never forget when my older brother “found out” about Santa. We were at a holiday gathering and someone mentioned that their kids were “too old for Santa.” My brother, who was already skeptical, instantly pounced on this comment. “You can’t be too old for Santa,” he insisted. He was about to say something else when my mom quickly escorted him upstairs. After telling him the “truth,” he came back downstairs looking like he had seen a ghost.

During the early years of Atlantis Magazine, I visited Patte Barham several times at her house, the Gillette Mansion, in Los Angeles. Greg had known her for a long time through his work on his Felix book, and he connected Patte and me as I was interested in the Hawaiian Royal Family and the Gillette Mansion was said to be built in replica of the Iolani Palace. It also had an Orthodox Chapel.

I hope everyone has been following the newest saga in Silicon Valley. I started writing a Twitter thread this morning and realized this deserved a little more than one-line zingers and memes. So here I am, back to substack after a one-year hiatus. I am bummed about what’s happening with OpenAI for a few selfish reasons. First and foremost, as someone who loves ChatGPT and nearly replaced Google search with it, I am sad that the founder who enabled the building of this product was ousted so unceremoniously.

One day, while in the course of your work, you receive a letter or email titled “NOTICE TO SHOW CAUSE” from your employer or the HR personnel. Such a letter can be a source of great anxiety and may have a destabilizing effect. Over the years, employees have responded differently to a notice to show cause, and their responses have either been proper or they have been a source of regret.

On the 8th January of this year I met with the Bristol Utopian Book Collective, where we discussed ‘A Psalm For The Wild Built’ by Becky Chambers. It was the second time I'd read the book, and I got carried away with my thoughts and ended up writing a guide to the fictional role of a Tea Monk offering Tea Service freely to others, as the protagonist of her novella does.