Welcome back summer

Though it doesn't fall on the calendar until nearly four weeks later, Memorial Day typically marks the beginning of summer. At Lazy Robot, we tend to always be one step ahead, so we welcomed it early with an eventful and memorable three-day weekend last week.

Friday night, I finally checked out Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's "Grindhouse." Complete with gritty, less than stellar quality film and fake previews for such enticing upcoming flicks as "Machete" and "Don't," the directors made every effort to successfully recreate an authentic drive-in, B movie double feature experience. (We did our part by sneaking booze into the theatre.)

Both movies focused on strong, powerful women such as machine gun-legged Rose McGowan in "Planet Terror" and Australian stuntwoman Zoë Bell in "Death Proof". If you can still find this movie at your local theatre by the time you read this, I highly recommend checking it out. Oh and big thanks to Freddy and Quentin for finally punishing Fergie for recording the inexcusable stain on humanity that is "My Humps." She deserved what she got.

Saturday evening we made our way to the World Financial Center's Winter Garden for Urban Word NYC's "Not Words Alone with CocoRosie" event. We thought we were just going out there to catch a free CocoRosie show and only found out about the spoken word aspect when we arrived.

The entire experience turned out to be simply amazing, one of those moving and beautiful experiences that you can only have in a city like New York. It would be an exercise in futility for me to even try and describe how the poetry and lush soundscapes intertwined to inspire the crowd the way they did. I'm not that poetic. Suffice it to say that it was one of the best evenings I've had since moving here and I'll definitely be on the lookout for more events like this in the future.

Afterwards, we headed back to more familiar parts of the city, mainly the East Village, to fill up on vodka and kill dance floors. I didn't make it back to my apartment until 6:30 a.m. Welcome back, summer. I missed you.

After work on Monday, we walked over to the Hudson Hotel in West Midtown to catch the first installment of Giant Step's Private Park Summer Series featuring Miguel Migs and Lisa Shaw. The rooftop combined with house music and $9 Coronas reminded us of Miami. (Yes, I said $9 Coronas. If you're planning to attend a party there, I suggest creative drinking methods...)

We danced it up for a few hours and it was refreshing to cut a rug to house music as opposed to dance rock or electro for once. The next installment lands on June 4 with guests Turntables on the Hudson, who also happen to be playing at the Water Taxi Beach this weekend on the REAL Memorial Day Weekend. I might just have to hit it up.

Like I said before: Welcome back, summer. I missed you!