Tag Archives: review

It Doesn’t Matter How Many Guys Your Burger Joint is Named After

Posted by on March 19, 2012 3 comments
Station Eats

Meet the press at Station Eats

Move over 5 Guys and Shake Shack, there’s a new homegrown alternative in town: Station Eats, offering juicy hamburgers, delicious veggie burgers, and snappy hot dogs built with healthy and all-natural ingredients. Also on the menu are Sloppy Joes, healthy salads, fries, and even milkshakes. You can see the full menu here. The burgers are made from grass-fed beef, the low-fat chicken hot dogs are made from all natural, cage-free chicken, and only hormone free and anti-biotic free milk from local farms are used in the milkshakes… Hey, even the fries are organic!

Station EatsFamiliar to many, Station Eats originally opened just over two years ago in downtown New Canaan, Connecticut as The Filling Station Co., and after much success and a name makeover has just opened a new restaurant in downtown Stamford.  Its Landmark Square location makes it easily accessible from many downtown locations including the mall, both movie theaters, and many bars, stores, and public parking areas. You can find it on Atlantic Street directly across from the Palace Theater, a well-known Stamford landmark. It’s set slightly back from the road and up a short flight of stairs, but you can’t miss their large neon sign (pictured). Read more »

Addendum to “The Fez”

Posted by on March 18, 2012 2 comments

So remember how we wrote about The Fez a couple months back and said the music was great but we’d never tried the food?  Well, we tried the food and it was delicious!

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A Very Belated Concert Review

Posted by on March 14, 2012 No comments

A couple weeks ago, I kind of lost my shit at work and decided it was time for an escape.  Having wrangled one free ticket to the opening night of Corrosion of Conformity‘s spring tour, I headed to the Gramercy by myself to see them play alongside Torche, Valient Thorr, and A Storm of Light.

A Storm of Light, ft. Andrea Black on guitar -- 3/1/12

A Storm of Light, ft. Andrea Black on guitar -- 3/1/12

A Storm of Light, from Brooklyn, was up first — and y’know how my whole Valient Thorr thing started because of an interview with Andrea Black?  Well, guess who was playing guitar in this band… Andrea Black.  (Life is like a river, brahhhhhh…)  I didn’t enjoy A Storm of Light as much as Black’s old group Howl; both bands fall into the doom category, but A Storm of Light was convincingly depressing.  Describing themselves on ReverbNation as apocalyptic metal, they stood almost stock-still, playing cavernous riffs against a background slideshow of tsunamis and starving animals.  By the end of their set, I was ready to slit my wrists in the hotel bathtub just to avoid the impending nuclear holocaust…

And then Valient Thorr came on.

Valient Thorr, 3/1/12

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An Assortment of Colorful Words: Peter Richards’ Nude Siren

Posted by on March 10, 2012 No comments

If any of you read my last book review on James Tate’s A Worshipful Company of Fletchers, you know that I’ve readily admitted that I don’t do a lot of recreational reading. I won’t go into every reason why, but predominantly it’s because I spend a whole lot of my time writing, favoring a hands-on approach to literature. Lately however, I’ve been making strides to sacrifice some of my early bedtime to allow for a gander at printed text. I used to carry this fear that too much reading (especially in terms of poetry) might cause me to be a little too influenced by the styles and techniques of other authors. I’m still a bit concerned about it, but I’ve also convinced myself of the many positive attributes that recreational reading has and its ability to improve my writing skills. Some of the reasons are obvious, let’s face it. There have been countless statistical studies about the importance of reading and its beneficial factors on the human mind, and the soul. This article concerns itself with a specific valuable asset: the development of vocabulary. An extensive vocabulary is what poet Peter Richards’ has acquired, and his book of poetry entitled Nude Siren is blatant proof of this notion. Read more »

Not Your Mainstream Novels: The Anomalies and Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel

Posted by on March 6, 2012 No comments

Way back in another life, I worked at a children’s publishing house in New York City. One of the perks was people who worked at other publishing houses would trade review copies of books with us, and people would put the ones they didn’t want in boxes around the building. The books inside were free for the taking.  I walked past one such box one day and a red book with black print that simply read The Anomalies  by Joey Goebel caught my eye.  I took the book and read it cover to cover that night. I still have that red book, battered and dog-eared from reading it a couple of times a year since 2003, but also from loaning it to friends.  The book is truly that good.

The Anomalies tells the story of the world’s least likely friends who form a rock band with the goal of  changing the world though the most mind-blowing rock n’ roll music ever made. Luster, the leader of the group is a 24-year-old genius (or possibly space alien) who is stuck living in the ghetto with his angry, crack-dealing brothers. Opal, at 80 years of age, is his best friend and former lover – who just wants to party and rock out, running from her family that wants to shove her in an old folk’s home and forget about her. She spends her days looking after Ember, the hostile and angry 8-year-old girl she “babysits” – though Ember’s parents haven’t been seen in months.  The three befriend Ray, an Iraqi-turned-American who doesn’t understand why people think he is gay as he searches for a man he shot and wounded in the war to make amends.  And the group is rounded out by Aurora, a chaste Satanist in a wheelchair. Read more »

Great Minds Think Alike (And They Don’t)

Posted by on February 25, 2012 No comments

As a follower of (too) many atheist Facebook pages, I heard about the book The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer last year. This book’s purpose was to explain why some people believe in God and some don’t. As someone who decided at the age of five that there was no such thing as a god, I’ve always wondered why people believe. And furthermore, in this current negatively charged political environment, I wonder what makes conservatives so conservative, what makes liberals so liberal, and why people think Waffle House food is edible. These are the real questions in life and The Believing Brain was supposed to have the answers.

The Believing BrainI cannot tell a lie, this book is a doozy — chock full of vocabulary words, scientific theory and things that, quite frankly, I’ve never ever heard about.  Hey, I was a theatre major. I haven’t taken a real science class, like, ever. And to be honest, I did have some trouble understanding what Shermer was talking about the first few times I’d read a paragraph. But I struggled through the tough parts only to be rewarded with glimmers of understanding. A faint grasp at times, other times a firm grip – no one could ever question the author’s authority on the subject at hand. Indeed he dissects his own skepticism and libertarian leanings, making it easier for this theatre major to understand and identify with his thought process. While I would have liked the book to be more pedestrian, more practical in its delivery, I appreciate the thoroughness with which Shermer approached the myriad of complexities of the human brain. Read more »

Places to Go: The Bowling Alley?

Posted by on January 8, 2012 4 comments

 

Are you tired of hanging around your house drinking?  Or going to a restaurant with your friends, sitting there staring at each other, and drinking?  The solution might be to pile everyone into a couple cars and head to the nearest bowling alley.

Last night, a few friends and I went out bowling at Rip Van Winkle Lanes in Norwalk.  I loved bowling as an elementary-schooler, but then went through a twenty-year period of thinking it was dorky — something for little kids’ birthdays, or an activity for non-custodial parents to do with their offspring when it was “their” weekend.  Turns out that if you add a couple pitchers of Sam Adams and give yourselves goofy names on the score-keeping TV, it’s a blast! I did better on my first game (79 — wow!) than my second (don’t even wanna know), probably due to the Sam Adams… Read more »