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By J.D. Oxblood
It’s true I’ve been out of the loop. Day gigs suck, that’s all I can say, and since good writers are now of less value than a foreclosed home in Florida, making a dollar these days is harder than ever. Not that anyone wants to hear me sing the blues. Let’s say I was in Mallorca banging Swedish stewardesses. Or at my pad in the Hamptons. Let’s all believe some lies and wake up happy for a change.
I missed a lot these last few weeks. That batard Madoff got sentenced, and, from what I’ve heard, none of his victims were given the option of kicking him in the nuts. So the justice system is totally screwed. Gay Pride happened, which I totally missed, which is ok, since I have no pride. And the Mermaid Day parade went off without a hitch, despite the ominous sense that the very ground would be torn out from under us at any moment. No one minded the rain—no one who turned out, anyway. It’s the best day of the year in New York City and y’all can’t ruin that. (IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE CONEY ISLAND AGAIN, PLEASE CALL YOUR COUNCILPERSON. CHECK OUT SAVECONEYISLAND.NET—THE SH*T HITS THE FAN JULY 13.)
Sidewalk musicians on Bedford Avenue @ N 7th July 2nd 2009
By the end of June people who can afford it have left town for two months, or at least every weekend. The moneyed leisure class get tans, sit on the dock or the deck drinking champagne, and contemplate early retirement. The rest of us wander the streets between July 4th and Labor Day looking for a party on or off a rooftop, cruising the nearly empty streets and braving the inevitable spike in violent crime. The unmoneyed leisure class (a.k.a. the unemployed) have plenty of time for idleness, and idle hands are indeed the devil’s weekend in the Hamptons.
June 25 2009 was a downer. A major downer. I was at home, getting ready to leave the warm comfort of Brooklyn for the mean streets of Manhattan, when I checked my Facebook and saw Lefty Lucy had updated her status. It said “Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett…Michael Jackson?” I thought she was kidding. I commented “<gasp!> You just jinxed him!” Then I saw that the news feed was adding posts rapidly. People from all over the world were saying the same thing: Michael Jackson, RIP.
This video is a sample of what J. D. got at the Vegas show. Enjoy!
I should get a better camera. Or at least not be so shy when taking pictures.
John Hodgman was performing a comedy show last night at Union Hall in Park Slope. I didn’t know that, so the giddy joy I felt as I told my companion PC was standing in front of us at the door was genuine. I thought perhaps that he was just there to soak up the hipster vibe like the rest of us. It turned out he was amplifying the hipster vibe, by a factor of ten at least.
by J.D. Oxblood
I’ve trolled the sources and, as usual, the best coverage comes from the AP.
It’s a sad day in the world today, as we mourn the passing of one of our favorites, one who made our days a little more pleasant, whether it be from reruns of “Kung Fu,” the forty-second viewing of “Kill Bill,” or even just those fab derivative Yellow Pages commercials. That voice, the voice alone that made the first “Kill Bill” so… enticing, knowing that was Dave-C fondling that sword and never seeing his face. And for children of the 70s, who goaded our friends on the playground with “grasshopper” and “until you can take this Jolly Rancher from my hand” or “until you can walk on the sand box without leaving a footprint”—this man is a part of our Jungian psyche, both an archetype to inhabit and a Campbellian hero to emulate. It’s a sad day.
And then there’s the question of the cause of death.
This is what I get for living near art students.
Rock of Love
Sunday night is Kitty Nights at Bar on A. I showed up because I heard Calamity Chang was debuting her tribute to Brett Michaels, and I had just finished a three day DVR marathon of Rock of Love. That and our star reporter has been feverishly packing his suitcase for Vegas where he will be covering the Miss Exotic World show, so he wasn’t able to make it. He is going to be giving up-to-the-nanosecond updates from the big event on Twitter, so if you aren’t following him already, do yourself a favor and put him on your list. You won’t regret it.
Stars and bars forever!
Who is laughing now?
Just five years ago some Americans were painting their Hummers in the stars and stripes, confident that the “liberation” of Iraq would bring global peace and low, low gas prices. The Hummer symbolized American strength, wealth, and frontier attitude. Now all those cowboys who thought they were starring in an Old West flick have been told “Go East young man!” as the Hummer brand is sold to a Chinese company.
It’s too easy to say that their jingoistic hubris is the root cause of this national humiliation. Instead I’ll point out that passing the baton of overweening douche-baggery to the Chinese might be exactly what saves our republic.
Christine Elmo
Last Thursday, May 21st, I clanked down the metal stairs of Jimmy’s 43 and into the subterranean bar completely and thoroughly confused. I had been invited by Christine Elmo to come to a benefit for a dance production she has choreographed and hopes to produce. Christine is a New York dance artist who has performed in the city and Europe extensively for the last two years. (Check out the video of dancing in Central Turkey and her CV here. Beautiful!) She’s a mover and a shaker in every sense of the phrase. So I guess I expected the benefit would be in a black box theater south of Houston, someplace that reeks of fresh paint and sawdust.
Or: a categorical thesis on the recycled recycling of recyclables in pop culture
Everything old is Jung again
by J.D. Oxblood
I knew we were in bad shape during the previews. Sandwiched in between trailers for the latest installment of the “Terminator” franchise and the sequel to “Transformers” was an ad for an action-packed Summer Blockbuster that I didn’t recognize. I started thinking… what haven’t they done yet, and what could this be? Evil villains in hot Matrix-y black leather, a handpicked crew of “elite” heroes donning metallic super-suits… I turned to my date and said, “This has to be ‘G.I. Joe.’” In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m basically a pessimist, which means that I HATE to be right.
[Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the new “Star Trek” yet, and want to, don’t read this. It will only piss you off. Devil’s advocate alert: if you have seen “Star Trek,” and loved it, please read this, it will totally piss you off. Sympathizer alert: if you saw “Star Trek” and thought it was stupid—whether or not you enjoyed watching it—I can’t make a recommendation one way or the other. I got nothing to say you don’t know already, but sometimes it’s nice to have confirmation.]
awwww...
The Sad Panda brought his friend to Bowling Green yesterday. His friend didn’t say much, but he was soooooo cute!
photo courtesy of Robin Lester
It looks like they’re filming an episode of Sesame Street in Washington Square Park today. Do down there and get your Oscar the Grouch on!
An undisclosed underground location for Burlesque Revealed
Jonathan Demme, Academy award winning director of Stop Making Sense, Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs, and most recently Rachel Getting Married, is introducing the films of Hatian/American/French director Michelange Quay this coming Tuesday at the French Alliance / Alliance Francaise.
The event will feature two of Mr. Quay’s movies, the short The Gospel of the Creole Pig and the feature Eat for This Is My Body. Mr. Quay’s films are lyrical meditations on post-colonialism. The Gospel of the Creole Pig takes us from the slaughter pits in Port-au-Prince, where pigs are butchered in disgustingly unsanitary conditions, to the houses on top of the surrounding hills where rich people live in comfort. Water runs from the toilettes of the hilltop houses to the trash and chaos of the Cité Soleil, and all the while the voice of the creole pig tells us ironically about the cycle of life and its hierarchies of oppression.
Eat for This Is My Body is more narrative, but not much. Mr. Quay’s project is to convey the interdependency of Whites and Blacks under colonization and afterward — the relations of power and how both sides seek to achieve identity from its opposite. (It’s very Hegelian, and like the “end of history” never complete.) To this end the movie is a dream of the moment when colonization breaks down, a no/every time and place where the masters have lost their allies, but the slaves have yet to become masters. Elaborate and stunning visuals wind along like yarn from a spinning wheel, and rather than dialogue (which is minimal) an incantatory voice over keeps the plot from interfering with the movie’s anxious emotional texture.
It is guaranteed to be an enriching and thought provoking evening, and I personally can’t wait to see the discussion between Demme and Quay!
Tuesday May 26 at 7 p.m.
Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th Street
FIAF Members Free** ($2 advance tickets)
Non-Members $10
Students w/ ID $7
Panda Man takes a load off downtown
Poor little guy. I can only imagine how hot he’ll be tomorrow whent the temps are supposed to be in the 80s!
Ruby Valentine
By J.D. Oxblood
City Winery is a big, fat, wooden room that would make a vacationing couple from Vermont feel very at home. High ceilings smattered with rotating fans, a pervasive blonde woodtone, and a stage so deep you could stack the Rockettes 6-deep and they could still kick. We rolled in around 10 to witness the changing of the guard—upper East Side diners were paying the stiff tabs for their undersized tapas & pricey vino as downtown hoodlums played musical chairs, vying for decent seats as they became available, nestling up to the stage and onto the raised dining area in back. This was a big room … could Doc fill it?
Bird of Paradise
He did, but the sound system didn’t. The PA was lacking, but I quickly forgot about it as the shapely Bird of Paradise came on to warm up the crowd with a little gogo to surf music, in a purple sparkly bra and a short skirt cut on an angle, accentuated with bangles and nude fishnet stockings. Babe-o-licious.
The Propeller company cast doing Q & A after the show
Last Thursday some of the Propeller company’s all-male cast sat down with the audience to discuss their production of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
The last time I saw the Propeller company was two years ago when they did Midsummer Night’s Dream and Taming of the Shrew in repertory at BAM. The Taming production highlighted the text’s sexual violence by by playing on LGBT domestic violence issues. Petruchio as an abusive boyfriend just seems scarier when it’s a big, butch, swaggering cowpoke beating up on a skinny, emo boy. Or maybe they were reading too much into a cute, human story of a man teaching his new wife to be respectful. Either way, it was powerful — that is to say good theater — and good theater is always interesting.
DO NOT BE ALARMED!!!
The Alliance for Downtown informs us here at CC that there is a video shoot today at Exchange Place. Thanks for the warning! I guess TV has its act together more than the office of the POTUS, whose low-flying plane stunt caused a real life evacuation of freaked out office workers last month.
Fake fire trucks
I love the props! How unrealistic is this news van?!
Fake news van
Hipster riot for free guac
The 5th of May is a lot of things to a lot of people. You couldn’t turn on the radio or open up a web browser yesterday without someone telling you that the 5th of May is the day Karl Marx was born, the day Cy Young threw the first perfect game in modern baseball, the Day that Kublai Khan became the ruler of the Mongol empire, and the day that Coco Chanel debuted Chanel No. 5. It also happens to be the day that Mexican troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza repulsed repeated attacks by French troops under Charles de Lorencez at the Battle of Puebla. This is the occasion celebrated as “Cinco de Mayo.”
By J. D. Oxblood
What does the Kentucky Derby have to do with New York City, you ask? The answer is twofold: the Kentucky Derby is the first of three races in the Triple Crown, which culminates in the Belmont Stakes, held right here on Long Island, AND, as it turns out, there are a lot of Kentucky transplants to New York. And if this blog is dedicated to culture, we should focus our lens wherever culture is found, no matter how hillbilly, depraved or—in this case—well-lubricated.
Handicapping the Derby is always a crap shoot, and this year was no exception. In a race with 20 horses, anything can happen, especially when so many of them are essentially untested. Favorite Dunkirk was going after the Roses with only 4 starts under his saddle. Favorite Friesan Fire was optimism incarnate for trainer “Cowboy” Jones, following a devastating tragedy last year when show horse Eight Belles had to be euthanized seconds after the race with two shattered legs. I Want Revenge, the heavy favorite, scratched the day before the big race. Pioneerof the Nile [sic] never caught my eye because of the wonky spelling—exactly the kind of nonsense that proves I’ll never be an adept handicapper.
This van has been downtown by Bowling Green for the last couple of days. What is it doing? What’s the news that requires such a big dish?
Moments before Lady GaGa took the stage at Terminal 5
I was cranky at 11:45 after spending 45 minutes in stop-and-go traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge. It seemed like everyone on Long Island was trying to push their cars into Manhattan. I prayed that some supernatural force would strike upstate lawmakers blind and replace them with legislators who know that fewer cars in Manhattan + more money for the MTA = real growth for NYC. Then I prayed to make it to Lady GaGa’s show at Terminal 5 on time.
The doors opened at 11. Three opening acts made up the bill, and I figured each one would be 15 minutes, so by the time I rolled in at 12, I was prepared to be homicidally angry, worried that I had missed her altogether. But luck was on my side. She waited for the witching hour to start the show, and I had just enough time to grab a drink and wade hip deep into the sweaty, writhing flesh pond surrounding the stage before beats started pumping out of the PA.
Murray and friends at Corio Saturday April 25 2009
Don’t get any funny ideas from the title of this post. When I say I spent Saturday night on Murray Hill, don’t think I was drinking at the Rodeo Bar.
I was the special guest of legendary Murray Hill for “This is Burlesque” at Corio. “That’s impossible!” I hear you say. “You’re just an anonymous blogger whose idea of a good time on Saturday night is to get stress management counseling at the Bay Ridge Community Service Center.” Yes, that may be true. But thanks to Twitter, I made a new friend, and he made my night.
I was in San Diego last weekend, and standing outside of Anthony’s on the Marina, waiting for a table, witnessed two “beautiful” people exit the restaurant. A passerby said, isn’t that Jerry Rice? Sure enough, a busboy ran out for an autograph. I couldn’t believe I actually had a camera on me; if I weren’t so slow on the draw, I might’ve gotten pix of his slammin’ outfit or the slammin’ girl that was with him.
**
JDX
Jo Weldon with her pupils Friday night at the Slipper Room
Friday night (April 24th) was graduation night for Jo Weldon’s New York School of Burlesque at the Slipper Room.
Each and every one of the women who performed are stars and gave standout performances. But natural talent only goes so far. Ms. Weldon not only knows how to pick them, she also knows how to train them.
by J.D. Oxblood
Our livery car driver has inexplicitly decided to roll all the way down Flatbush, which is like a Christmas Eve parking lot considering that it’s Saturday night in Park Slope. I’m wearing a gangster-fied pinstriped double-breasted jacket, my editor is in a full tux, and our other accomplice looks like a 1950s cartoon character. We’re rolling with three gorgeous women and a bodyguard; I somehow feel that we’re one gorgeous woman short—I like to ride with a spare.
We arrive at the Montauk Club, designed by Francis H. Kimball and completed in 1891. The story goes that he was inspired by a palace on Venice’s Grand Canal, and the imposing Venetian gothic architecture rises from the banality of the Slope like a monolith in a highlands desert. Stone. Mahogany. Stained glass. My jacket pocket feels suddenly empty—I really should be packing hooch to fully be in character.
The folks on the G line near Pratt have been especially creative recently, so I thought I’d share their work with the rest of you. The one above is a sentimental mash up that shows how sports cheese and Lifetime channel romance cheese blend so seamlessly. The one below is just FUNNY.
Busker in Battery Park
Though the official first day of Spring was March 20, on the streets of Lower Manhattan it felt more like Winter … until today. The crowds were out in force in Battery Park. Many of those enjoying the sunshine were tourists, and I swear 3/4 of the people I walked by were speaking French.
Battery Park flowers
The flowers got the memo. They were in full bloom. And I saw a nice fat earthworm on the sidewalk too.
Hellooooo Spring!
