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A downward dog with a building up your butt? That's Yoga at Bryant's Park. When I travel I try to pretend I've been in the place I'm visiting for years. That is, rather than rush about seeing sights, I try to do normal things that I or anyone else would do at home. Like eat, sleep, work, buy groceries. I might take in a museum or show or two, but I don't run around with this great long list and a Fodor's duct-taped to my chest. In fact, I don't run around at all. I've been known to spend days indoors in the heart of a NYC summer, the MOMA, Met, Cooper Hewitt, and Century 21 clothing store beckoning, glued to my laptop. What's the fun in that, I hear you ask? In this way, I don't get so much of that 'gotta tear myself away' angst and 'get back to real life' letdown when my stay comes to an end. This *is* real life. Or as a friend put it, 'This is not a holiday, this is my life.' So my attending a free yoga class in the mid

I just visited the famous Mandolin Bros fretted instrument shop on Staten Island, NY. Mandolin Bros, owner Stan May (left), the Gal with a Guild, and ever patient sales expert Dennis Ryan. … and came out with something a transglobal telecommuter can neither store, stash or carry terribly easily: a brand new guitar! Just like the time I schlepped home a giant framed Paul Alan Bennett picture for my birthday last year, and which is now freeloading in a friend's dining room in Eugene, Oregon. (As you will read, I almost dropped $750 on a blanket too…) "Paintings and blankets, you're settling," quipped my sage friend, Jerry Norquist. I've never heard of Mandolin Bros until I happened to jump onto the tail of the New York Cycle Club Ride to the Staten Island Bluegrass Festival, led by a bluegrass aficionado, Mark Gelles. Take a look at Straight Drive playing on stage here. "You gotta go there, best shop in New York," said Mark. "By t

This story originally appeared on the Bike Friday website (now on the Internet Archive) MOVIE CLIPS UDPATE Dec 2006: See this interview on ... YouTube - click on the movie below. “I MAKE an instrument for the future, but alas, in the present,” laments David Hannauer, pulling various egg-shaped pieces of clay from their protective socks. Laid out before me is a small ensemble of his vast ocarina collection, “small egg-shaped wind instruments with a mouthpiece and holes for the fingers”, according to my laptop dictionary. All but two are the careful handiwork of David himself, who dreams of the day he can get enough people interested in this quirky, glorified whistle to form an ocarina “choir”. David hails from a family of musicians – he was a child cellist, his mother is a volinist, his sister plays with the Brooklyn Philharmonic orchestra and his dad sings. Happy birthdays and Grace at the Hannauer house were always rendered in pitch-perfect six part harmony. Born to