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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE http://www.saveconeyisland.net/
PRESS CONTACT: Juan Rivero, Spokesman
Save Coney Island, 646.229.6609, info@saveconeyisland.net
AS N.Y. HONORS JANE JACOBS, HER SON IS ‘APPALLED’ AT CONEY ISLAND REZONING PLAN
Ned Jacobs: ‘This rezoning plan for Coney Island does not appear to reflect
the urban values and planning principles she espoused’
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.
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.
This is what I get for living near art students.
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.
Priceless
A picture is worth a thousand words — especially when the letters have been rearranged to spell “vomit.” What more needs to be said?
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!
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!
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.
By J.D. Oxblood
Through friends of friends I got on the guest list and passed by to check out the hubbub, bub. M2 is one of those Chelsea monstrosities that is everything you would expect—a long frickin’ walk from the subway, an enormous, cavernous room cut up by gargantuan furniture pieces guaranteeing that movement becomes impossible when the joint gets crowded and that no proper dance floor will ever erupt, grotesque hanging structures (in this case, faux-mirror balls constructed by crystals hung in sequence by 50-pound test) designed to remind you of the vertigo-inspiring height of the ceilings (nothing declares opulence in NYC like wasted space), louder than necessary, and a fantastic, state-of-the art lighting setup that is completely underused, like your grandma buying a Hummer and never taking it out of the driveway.
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.
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!
Yay! Obama announced a plan to invest $8 billion in high speed and existing rail projects! This is a welcome change from the plan of the past administration to strangle Amtrak and throw it in a tub to drown it. Build it, and they will come. Please lord, let the economically stimulating effect of mass transit in New York City show the Feds and the villains in the New York State senate that mass transit is a priority, not a privilege.
.357 Lover performs at the Coney Island benefit party at Southpaw Saturday night
The band .357 Lover promises on its website to sacrifice their souls so that we may be properly rocked, and Saturday night they delivered.
The Coney Island benefit party at Southpaw was Brooklyn to a T. Freaks, Geeks, Hipsters, Lezzies, Homos, Straights, Bents, Rockers, Mods, Burlesquers, and B-Boys all showed up to save the dilapidated symbol of Brooklyn Soul. The World Famous Bob co-Emceed the Burlesque potion of the show with Miss Astrid, and let me tell you dear reader, they are two of the funniest women in show biz. (Murray Hill, who was not there, is the funniest man.)
It was a night of New York burlesque all stars including Julie Atlas Muze, Gigi La Femme and the World Famous Pontani sisters who performed together and separately.
Peekaboo Pointe
You can’t go wrong with that lineup. Angie Pontani sealed the deal with her show stopping tub act, courtesy of Hendrick’s Gin. After that it was hard (so to speak) to walk out of the club upright.
The special surprise of the evening, what made it really special and not just really good, were the Daisy Spurs. They tore up the stage with sizzling energy and heart-pounding dance moves. It was my first time seeing the Daisy Spurs, and I was so impressed I imediately updated my mobile FB status to “Daisy Spurs, my new favorite crazy.” That impressed.
Some lady was yelling at the camera people, “What is this? Law and Order? Law and Order? It’s always Law and Order!”
by J.D. Oxblood
It’s so rare that I make it to a Broadway show—what with most of the Great White Way awash in Disney-fied claptrap, reincarnations of old musicals and old movies reincarnated as new musicals—that we decided to make a night of it. So much so that I actually went out and purchased an umbrella to keep my suit from getting soaked in the dismal, rainy April night. I was excited, yet anxious, because the last time I tried to get my fill of some good, old-fashioned absurdist drama, I was cringingly disappointed: to anyone else who shelled out the big bucks to sit through last years revival of (Harold Pinter’s exquisite test) “The Homecoming,” my condolences. Reeked so bad it took a month to get the smell out of my tux.
The Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s anti-classic, at Studio 54, features Bill Irwin and Nathan Lane as Didi and Gogo, with none other than John Goodman as Pozzo and the spellbinding John Glover as Lucky, under the direction of Anthony Page. (FYI: everyone in the previous sentence has won a Tony, with the exception of Goodman, who’s won a Golden Globe.)
Hit bonus plus two for being a "native"
Two art interventions caught my eye the other day, so I thought I’d share. The one above is more obviously hipster ironic than the one below. The one below is just great art. (I hope you can see the stubble lovingly drawn in on her chin.) Now that the G will only be running every half hour, young aspiring artists will have plenty of time to perfect their skills at the Metropolitan stop.
Kathy, or Ken?
Chinese electric cars, courtesy of the NY Times
There’s plenty of uncertainty on what the future holds, but one thing is for sure, the 21st century will not be like the 20th.
While Obama and Gordron Brown try to convince the Europeans not to take away our capitalism toys, the Chinese are making exactly the kinds of massive public investments in the future that Krugman and others have argued the US must make in order to stay relevant. The money isn’t the problem. Excluding some rightwing nutters in Congress, our country has signed on to the idea that something must be done (other than cut taxes) to ameliorate this economic crisis. But why isn’t any of that money going to beef up Amtrak or the MTA? The answer: no one in power in America, either Democrat or Republican, has a 21st century vision.
But the Chinese have it.
culturalcapitol.com 