Kurt Cobain Watches “Smells Like Teen Spirit” For 1st Time @RSHotel
Kurt Cobain Watches “Smells Like Teen Spirit” For 1st Time @RSHotel
Posted on 05. Mar, 2010 by BrianSimpson in Hotel
The power, the amazing ability to connect even the most random information, is what makes the internet so astounding. Yesterday as I am scanning TweetDeck I notice a tweet scroll through the ‘Roger Smith Hotel‘ column. (not everyone uses @RSHotel I figured out a while ago. lol )
Here is the tweet sent out by Roger A.K.A. @yaysarcasm to @SuzanneVara Owner of Kherize5 Advertising & Social Media Agency and my response:
Roger quickly responded with a tweet leading me closer to the truth:
I instantly looked up “Heavier Than Heaven” on-line continuing to track down the truth behind Roger’s tweet… its not that I didn’t believe you Roger but afterall it is twitter…right?!
Here is what I found next:
-
page 205 Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain By Charles R. Cross
page 205 Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain By Charles R. Cross
I have walked into work today feeling a little bit different. Call me corny but in a Hotel that has built a reputation on story telling and people this to me is a damn good one. Kurt Cobain, Nirvana… fan or not you have to admit the history and nostalgia behind this discovery is a story to be repeated and shared.
I end by thanking Roger @YaySarcasm and @SuzannaVara for having a social conversation and sharing your insights with us here @RSHotel ! I will always remember this… its just cool.
R.I.P.
A New Wokai, March 11th @ RSH
Posted on 04. Mar, 2010 by DanielKalmar in Hotel
A New Wokai
Wokai is off to an incredible start in 2010. We’re keeping up the momentum with a global campaign for the 2.0 launch of our site (www.wokai.org). Please join us for our New Year kick-off to learn more about Wokai’s fresh new look and to rally in a good year for the impoverished in China.
Date: Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Time: 7:30 – 10:30pm
Venue: The Roger Smith Hotel, The Solarium (top floor)
Dress code: cocktail attire / smart casual
Ticket price: $60* (purchase tickets online ASAP: www.wokai.org/tickets)
*Ticket includes: a donation, full open bar, food and entertainment
A big thanks to our sponsor Cathay Pacific!
Mark your calendars today and don’t miss your chance to participate in this meaningful/fun event (space limited).
Thank you for your continuing support for Wokai.
If you are interested in learning more about Wokai, we invite you to watch this presentation that Wokai’s Co-Founder and CEO, Casey Wilson, gave at Google or click on the logos below to check out some of our recent media features.
Margot Leverett and the Mountain Klezmer Boys
Posted on 01. Mar, 2010 by DanielKalmar in Arts, Hotel
Half-to-Help teamed up with the Roger Smith Hotel, Panman Productions, and Action Against Hunger | ACF-USA to bring you our first Haiti relief art show and concert. Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys played in the Penthouse of the Roger Smith Hotel with video accompaniment of Freakcast.
Second Sundays Guitar Series: Daniel Acsadi
Posted on 25. Feb, 2010 by DanielKalmar in Arts, Chamber Music Series
Sunday March 14th, 4PM.
Daniel Acsadi is the Director of the Boston Classical Guitar Society and is finishing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at New England Conservatory with Eliot Fisk. Through his acclaimed performances, arrangements, and teaching, Dan is a passionate advocate for both the guitar and the music of his native Hungary. Dan’s arrangements encompass art and folk music of the 18th through 21st centuries, innovatively expanding the guitar’s repertoire. He is firmly committed to the guitar as a versatile chamber music instrument, performing regularly with voice, viola, violin, flute string quartet, and guitar ensemble. Beginning his musical studies at age six, Dan earned his M.M. from New England Conservatory (NEC) and B.A. from Cornell University, where he double majored in music and economics. Dan has previously studied with Pablo Cohen and John Hall, and has performed in the masterclasses of Manuel Barrueco, Leo Brouwer, Eduardo Fernandez, and Adam Holzman. Dan maintains a large and diverse teaching studio in the Boston area.
co-presented by the NYCCGS and RogerSmithArts
The Solarium, 16th Floor
The Roger Smith Hotel
Tickets $15, includes wine and cheese
Pay at the door, cash only
For reservations, email rogersmitharts@rogersmith.com or call 212.339.2092
Hats Off To Our Friends (Red Sox Hats That Is)
Posted on 21. Feb, 2010 by BrianSimpson in Uncategorized
Back in January Adam Wallace and I (Brian Simpson) had the chance to speak at Jeff Pulvers #140Conf Meet-Up in Cambridge, MA. While we were there we were invited, via Twitter, by The Colonnade Hotel (@Colonnade) to come have lunch and talk ’social media’. We met with Chris, Nicole and Katie at Brassarie Jo’s inside the Colonnade. A couple of weeks later Katie was in NYC for business and stopped by to say hello and visit The Roger Smith. This is how connections and friendships evolve. Last week I decided I needed a new Red Sox hat, and in my opinion, there is only one place to buy one, Yawkey Way – outside of Fenway Park. I spent the weekend in Boston and enjoyed amazing hospitality at The Colonnade. As a resident of Boston for thirteen years The Colonnade was always my popular Summer hang-out due to their great rooftop pool! Being able to actually stay there was indeed a treat. I even ran into a couple people I knew that now work there. Because of their involvement and commitment to social networking I have a new Boston ‘home’. If you are ever in the Boston area or live near Boston I suggest you go by for a room, a bite to eat or a drink by the pool (Summer only). You will not be disappointed.
@RShotel Food Writers’ Conf: All of the Panels (Video Archive)
Posted on 16. Feb, 2010 by Birdsong in RS Food Writers Conf, Uncategorized
Is tradition in print food writing dead? The closing of Gourmet and the large number of jobs lost in traditional food magazines and newspapers suggests it is. If it is dead, what will replace it? And how can one make the alternatives financially viable? These were some of the questions that fifty-eight of America’s top writers, editors and agents addressed at the Roger Smith Food Writers’ Conference held last Friday, Saturday and Sunday (February 12-14). Twelve sessions and four workshops discussed the current and future state of food writing in newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, blogging, ezines, websites and ebooks. The main message was simple: The food writing field is in rapid transition and success now depends on adopting a multi-media approach to communicating – including traditional good writing plus video, blogging and social media. Attendees were excited by the possibilities of the new media, but how to make these new media generate full time salaries for professional food writers remains unclear, and many attendees wondered if professional food writing was dead– and it would now just become a hobby for those interested in food.
Andy Smith
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click here to watch
From Websites to Blogs to Facebook
Food writing has progressed from tiny triangular marks impressed in clay tablets, stored in heaps in Mesopotamia, to much tinier magnetic impressions stored somewhere “out there” in cyberspace. Changes in the medium may change the message, but the goal is the same: writers want readers to experience their work—what’s different is that readers get to respond to writers more directly than ever before. Like it or not, food writing is not likely to change back to the one-directional medium it once was.
Gary Allen, chair
Irena Chalmers
Mitchell Davis
Bret Thorn
Laura Weiss
click here to watch
TV and Beyond: The Future of Food and Cooking in Broadcast Media
Beginning with home economist-hosted programs in the 1940s, cooking on television has evolved over the last sixty plus years into a phenomenal industry and pastime. What does the future of food media look like and where/how will we view it? Who will be our guides? What will we be taught and how and what will we learn?
Kathleen Collins, chair
Geof Drummond
Joe Langhan
Dana Polan
Krishnendu Ray
click here to watch
The Future of Food Writing on the Internet
This panel will explore how the continually changing, ever-evolving world of Internet technology is impacting food writers. Will technology make it easier–or harder–for writers to make a living? Will there come a time when a writer can completely sidestep traditional media and become successful, financially and critically? How will developing technologies impact–positively and negatively–the industry
David Leite, chair
Elissa Altman
Joe Langhan
Bonnie Tandy Leblang
Renee Schletter
click here to watch
Blogs with Tweet Sauce: The Future of Recipes
The Internet and television cooking shows have irrevocably changed the way cooks search out and use recipes. How do we deal with the challenges of this new environment? What recipes can we trust? Is the on-line community fostered by recipe ratings of any value? This panel will explore the future of recipes, their reliability, their validity as cultural documents, and their impact on how people learn to cook and go about preparing daily meals.
Lorna Sass, chair
Elissa Altman
Melissa Clark
Barbara Haber
Amanda Hesser
Sarah Kagan
Barbara Ostmann
click here to watch
Powerful Potables
Calling all cork dorks and coffee geeks! How is the increasingly specialized world of beverage writing evolving? How have platforms like Wine 2.0 changed the playing field? If you already write about food, what tools & training do you need to expand into writing about wine and other potables.
Kara Newman, chair
Alice Feiring
Alan Kropf
Nora Maynard
click here to watch
Good-Bye Gourmet, Hello Yelp!: The Changing Role of the Restaurant Critic
However much the media landscape has changed, people still want to know where to eat. This panel on restaurant reviewing will touch on the past, current, and future of restaurant reviewing. Emphasis will be placed on changes in the relationship between the reviewer and diners, the reviewer and media outlets, and the reviewer and the restaurant industry. The craft of reviewing restaurants will be explored in the context of other forms of cultural criticism.
Mitchell Davis, chair
Gabriella Gershenson
Irene Sax
Robert Sietsema
click here to watch
Food for Thought: The Future of Academic Food Writing
Recent years have witnessed an explosion in academic food writing. Food series have rolled off university presses and specialized and cross-disciplinary journals abound, all to sate the growing appetite for classroom materials and scholarly investigation. This panel unites distinguished authors and editors in the academic world to assess where we are and where we might be going in this hot pot of academe.
Cathy Kaufman, chair
Ken Albala
Jennifer Crewe
Bruce Kraig
Marion Nestle
Andrew F. Smith
click here to watch
Turning Your Life and Food into a Best Seller
In today’s world, food writing is everywhere– in newspapers, magazines, recipe headnotes, web sites, blogs and tweets. Much of it is informative and some of it pretty interesting, but not necessarily the stuff of literature. For that, readers turn to memoirs–some food based, some with food as a potent ingredient unveiling other lives and times. What distinguishes a food memoir and makes it fresh? These panelists will tell you how they did just that.
Judith Weinraub, chair
Monica Bhide
Kathleen Flinn
Betty Fussell
Mimi Sheraton
click here to watch
Food Writing Profession: Current State and Future Prospects
Holly Hughes’ words, “Food has never been so high on America ’s agenda – are 21st-century food writers ready to meet that challenge?” To open the conference, a panel of four food-writing visionaries will present the art of food writing historically, presently and in the future from their points of view. Molly O’Neill will discuss the changing context of American food writing, including food-travelogues to a social/political commentary on the world to legitimization of the nostalgia cult. In a more microscopic way, Holly Hughes will focus on the past decade in food writing. How do the lines between journalism and entertainment blur, considering celebrity chefs and television cooks who produce cookbooks? Where do food safety and health fall in the spectrum of food writing today? Then, with a macro view of the world of food words, Ray Sokolov will look into the future. He sees the future of food writing much like its past, only more so. Moderator Antonia Allegra will look at why food writers write, even in this difficult economy; and she will discuss the thrust of food writing for cookbooks and other culinary writing as it exists today.
Antonia Allegra, chair
Holly Hughes
Molly O’Neill
Ray Sokolov
click here to watch
Surface or Substance: Food Writing in Magazines
What is the role of magazines in the food world today? Should they provide a practical guide to the kitchen, with plenty of recipes and useful techniques? Should they offer diversion through lifestyle stories and glossy images that make readers drool? Or do magazines have a responsibility to report on the ethical and political issues surrounding food in the twenty-first century? This panel of seasoned magazine editors and writers will explore the possibilities and limitations of food writing for magazines today.
Darra Goldstein, chair
Dana Bowen
Barbara Fairchild
Jane Daniels Lear
Jordana Rothman
Bret Thorn
click here to watch
Cookbooks and the Cyber-Age?
This panel will examine the current state and highly uncertain future of cookbook publishing. Panelists will consider how shifting patterns in home cooking and restaurant dining are altering people’s expectations of cookbooks. They will also discuss the impact that television has already had on the American cookbook audience as well as the radical changes being brought about by new phenomena such as cyber-publishing, culinary websites, blogs, and online recipe searches.
Anne Mendelson, chair
Rux Martin
Molly O’Neill
Roy Finamore
Angela Miller
click here to watch
Fight and Flight: the Newspaper Food Section of the Future
Fight and Flight: the Newspaper Food Section of the Future
A discussion of the evolution of food writing as newspapers take on the challenges of a very new day. The effect of RSS feeds; blogs; recipe websites; Twitter; the Food Network; and the turn away from print, on content, style, format, and even survival.
Cara De Silva, chair
Jane Black
Sylvia Carter
Kim Severson
Judith Weinraub
Adam Wallace & Ellen Petry Leanse (GOOGLE) from Amsterdam!
Posted on 26. Jan, 2010 by BrianSimpson in Community, Hotel
Adam Wallace of The Roger Smith Hotel is one of the special guests at The Future of Web 2.0 Meet-Up in Amsterdam.
Here is Adam speaking at the Meet-Up with Ellen Petry Leanse, Head of Enterprise Marketing Communications- GOOGLE (USA).
Why Fly To LA When You Can Drive…
Posted on 08. Dec, 2009 by BrianSimpson in Community
Day 1 :
At 4:26am on Thanksgiving morning I ( Brian Simpson )
climbed into a, yet to be released, Ford Fiesta with Jill Hanner and our journey to the LA Auto Show began.
Our first stop was Alexandria, VA where we had and amazing Thanksgiving meal with friends and relatives. 
After recovering from a mini food coma, we forged ahead, next stop Charlotte, NC, to see our friend and Roger Smith Hotel regular, Jason Keith (@JakRose). The trip to Charlotte was a hard stretch… We had been up for 15 hours, eaten way too much food and were driving through a downpour most of the way.
We arrived in Charlotte at approximately 1:30am. Jason greeted us, poured us each a glass of wine and then one of the days highlights was having a video chat with NYC’er Nicole D’Alonzo before falling fast asleep.
Day 2:
Alarm goes of at 6am and I really thought it was a joke…wow! We shower, pack and are on the road by 7am.
With her Starbucks in hand
Jill took over the driving duties for the first leg of the day, my hero ! Jill and I each mentioned over Twitter that we would be swinging through Atlanta around lunch-time and would like some recommendations and/or companions… First to respond was my friend Tessa, who suggested Holy Taco and said she would meet us there. Then came Chance, who neither of us knew yet and Russel a friend of Jill’s from YouTube. The five of us had a great lunch, took pictures swapped stories and did what all good ’social media’ people do, exchanged twitter handles and parted ways.
The second part of the day was going really well until we hit New Orleans and were confronted by thousands of Bayou Classic football fans. After circling The Hotel Monte Leone for about 30 minutes we were finally in. Bags were dropped, (literally) and dinner followed. After dinner we went for a quick drink at the famous rotating carousel bar in our hotel… big mistake, huge mistake. First of all trying to position yourself for a seat at a rotating bar means ’stalking’ the people you think are getting up next. Normally you can wait quietly in the shadows and as guests pay you swoop in, not the case. You must, as casually as possible, walk around the bar following your ‘targets’. Finally after about 20 minutes of ’stalking’ Jill and I had two seats. The best part was the couple getting up laughing and congratulating us on our efforts. I feel compelled to tell you this: Do NOT wait for a seat at the carousel bar. We sat for about one minute and felt so sick from the movement we left. Really? A moving bar… sounds cool, it isn’t. Its nauseating. Zzzz….
Day 3:
Local born n' raised !
Breakfast at the Bourbon House, after a failed attempt at IHOP, was great. We had a ‘local’ as a server and he made the buffet better than expected. After nomz we headed to the hotel, retrieved the car, showed the car to a twitter follower ’sketch’ and were headed out of town! After only about 30 minutes we came to a standstill. Jill sent out a request on twitter to find out the source of the delay. We were frustrated, we had to get way into Texas to stay on schedule. We quickly found out there had been a bad accident leaving 8 critically injured and 5 dead. Our frustration turned to appreciation and the 3 hour traffic jam seemed small in comparison. It was a full day of driving and we thought it was going to be a full night as well. Somewhere on the drive we lost a day and thought we needed to drive through the night. Our big question was how to stay awake…A brilliant idea came up – we sent my phone number over our twitter and facebook accounts and asked people to call us and call they did. The best was George from CO. He was warning us about the ’shape shifters’ & ’skin stretchers’ ( A.K.A. Aliens) as we cross into Arizona. Around midnight Jill (thankfully one of us was still thinking) realized we had the whole next day to drive to our next destination. As the sentence crossed her lips a hotel sign appeared, we were asleep within minutes.
Day 4:
Not in NYC anymore...
6 a.m. Off across Texas with Phoenix and other Fiesta agents ( Jody and Seth ) in our sights. Texas consisted of long, straight roads, a lot of road-kill (seriously more dead animals than I have ever seen in one day), sand storms, rain and interesting food… I think the fondest memory of this leg of the trip was walking into the mens room on our breakfast/brunch stop.
Nomz???
With one swing of the rickety door, yours truly, dressed in baggy jeans, a T-shirt and tattoos everywhere, is in the middle of four authentic Texans, covered head to toe in camouflage. The greatest part was that none of them were taking advantage of the one stall… they were instead just hangin out chatting… fastest use of a urinal in my history… after some bad coffee (really bad coffee) and marginal eggs, we were back on the road. We flew through El Paso, do not remember New Mexico (I think we went through it) and pulled into Phoenix in time for a quick drink at Jody G’s with Seth and co. before passing out.
Day 5:
Up early, showered and ready for the easy 325 mile jaunt into LA. First a little detour up to Anthem to visit an old friend of Jill’s from NY. After a wonderful morning, a tour of a beautiful home and being entertained by a 3yr old with more energy than both of us combined at this stage we were off to Starbucks and on our way. The ride from Arizona to California was fairly uneventful except for the fork in the highway when I swear the Fiesta really wanted to go towards Vegas, not LA… Once in LA it was off to the hotel, sushi and a little rest before the big Sunset Strip cruise and meeting at Mel’s Diner.
As a bonus my friend Rachael even showed up !
An added bonus was going by the Roxy and seeing Nic Adler, whom I had just met as a co-speaker at Gravity Summit in NYC, standing out front chatting it up with people in line… thats why he gets it!
My mantra for ’social media’ is great, like minded people meeting more great people – this trip connected me with some amazing people. I have new friendships and
memories that will hopefully last a lifetime !
I would like to thank Jill Hanner for allowing me to be her co-pilot and for editing a lot of video, The staff at Roger Smith Hotel for the time away and the people at Ford for allowing me to be a part of this wonderful experience !
Bsimi
Happy Thanksgiving from the Roger Smith
Posted on 23. Nov, 2009 by AdamWallace in Lily's Restaurant
thanksgiving at the roger smith hotel
prix fixe $45
november 26th, 2009 11am-8pm
—
~ butternut squash soup
~ herb croutons, gorgonzola cream
~ roast turkey breast, braised leg and thigh
with root vegetable ragout.
~ haricot verts with toasted almonds
sweet potato mash with rum butter
~truffle sage chicken sausage stuffing
cranberry and walnut chutneyduet of pies
~pecan pie & pumpkin pie
with cardamom, milk chocolate sorbet
—
make a reservation!
Email lilys@rogersmith.com or call 212.339.2097
