THIS CRAMPED CHELSEA office could be mistaken for a telemarketing operation, except for the small bookshelf lined with titles like Delirious New York and Women Artists of Italian Futurism.
THIS CRAMPED CHELSEA office could be mistaken for a telemarketing operation, except for the small bookshelf lined with titles like Delirious New York and Women Artists of Italian Futurism.
Already an accomplished artist, actor, musician, composer, director and cult television master, one wonders what’s left for John Lurie to do. He seems to indicate as much by opening the door to his Soho loft on a damp Monday night wearing an open dress shirt that exposes his bare chest. He’s just finishing dinner—a straight steak, no side, plus a glass of whiskey—yet looks like a man who has worked too much, received too little recognition and is ready to air out the posers who’ve taken over the City he used to run.
When most large white things turn 50, they celebrate with a trip to Sandals, or if they are daring, to Hedonism.The Guggenheim, however, is taking a different approach by opening its doors to all art lovers for the low price of nothing.There are a slew of events to draw you close into its snail like center plus, of course, its wonderful collection, a Kandinsky exhibition and free cookies.
The Esopus Creek is a renowned troutfishing stream that flows through the Catskill Mountains into the Ashokan Reservoir, a principle water source for New York City. It is also the name of a non-profit foundation, a magazine and now a gallery that all celebrate the quirky, literate and inspired vision of its founder, Tod Lippy.
Bitforms Gallery specializes in media-driven, (mostly) digital works and is one of the more distinctive galleries in the city. They have included robotic installations, sound-scapes (that respond to the viewers interactions) and automated paintings. The current exhibition of Michael Najjar’s work, High Altitude, seemed like a departure at first: Twelve panoramic ink jet prints of photographs of mountain landscapes.
AT A CERTAIN point in every New Yorker’s life, he or she reaches a saturation level with tourist attractions. Either you’ve done the things everyone is supposed to do—the trips to the Empire State Building and the Met—or entertained out-of-state guests with those same trips. But for anyone who thinks they’ve seen it all, New York City still has a lot to offer—especially when it comes to museums. Here are seven of them worth checking out.
IT’S 10 A.M. AND Anne Pasternak, president of the 33-year-old public art organization Creative Time, is listing the tasks she’s already completed for the day. “I sat on my yoga mats, went to the bank, sent my daughter a care package, wrote a grant”—she paused briefly before cheerily continuing—“sent three thank you letters and did all my emails for the day.”
Lots of great ideas start with a night of heavy drinking—it’s the actual execution that normally suffers. Not so for Hard Case Crime. Charles Ardai and Max Phillips founded the Upper West Side-based publishing house to reintroduce readers to the hardboiled crime fiction of pulp novels five years ago after a night at the bar turned their typical discussion of a mutual love for the genre into plans for a pulp publishing company.
Lots of great ideas start with a night of heavy drinking—it’s the actual execution that normally suffers. Not so for Hard Case Crime. Charles Ardai and Max Phillips founded the Upper West Side-based publishing house to reintroduce readers to the hardboiled crime fiction of pulp novels five years ago after a night at the bar turned their typical discussion of a mutual love for the genre into plans for a pulp publishing company.
Cornflakes With John Lennon: And Other Tales From a Rock N’ Roll Life By Robert Hilburn, Out now This book of essays by the former L.A. Times rock critic looks over his career at the musicians and music that shaped rock ‘n’ roll.
There was a time when concert photography was an art. Someone with a good camera, a trained eye and a passion for music would crawl to the front of a stage and plant himself there, waiting to capture something about a performer that would make for a moving portrait. Indeed, rock photography was an art form. And while today there are still top-notch photographers following bands—despite many of them being shuffled out of the pit in front of the stage after a measly three songs—what’s far more prevalent is the obnoxious glow of cell phone screens as fans spend entire concerts snapping their own photos to upload to Facebook, Flickr or a surplus of other sites.
Ours is a cellular city, a tangled organism built of bricks with distinct walls. You can leave your life completely without leaving the five boroughs. This week those worlds offer portals from homoerotic ass-kicking to novel reading to moon landings. And all you need is a Metrocard.
FOR THE PAST nine years, Jessica Stockton Bagnulo has known she wanted to own and operate her own bookstore. Now, she has the opportunity to peddle classics, cookbooks, graphic novels and more at Fort Greene's newest attraction, the Greenlight Bookstore.
IT APPEARS TO be impossible for any review of Oran Canfield’s scarred memoir Long Past Stopping to get past the first sentence without mentioning that he is the son of Jack Canfield, the self-help grifter and author of Chicken Soup for the Soul and other dreck—see? But the book is remarkable not for its author’s random paternity—Oran could have been anyone’s child and throughout much of the book, that’s exactly who he is, shuttled from relative to friend to colleague to acquaintance to stranger—but for the dry, unaffected voice and the plain unornamented language used to detail the near erasure of a soul in minute increments.
The Butcher By Philip Carlo, Out Now The author of Gaspipe and Iceman tells the story of Tommy “Karate” Pitera, one of the most feared mob hit men ever, and the DEA agent who hunted him down in 1980s New York.
Rising from the ranks of the unwashed standup masses, Eugene Mirman has made it to the top of the comedy heap with his sardonic, goofy brand of humor.Tonight he kicks off his titular comedy festival starring some of the city’s best comics in a similar vein: Kristen Schaal, Bobby Tisdale,Todd Barry.The opening night lineup features live acts as well as video by Max Silvestri.There’s also a whole roast pig involved.
Keemo, a smooth - talking guy with a friendly smile, spends his Friday nights on the corner of West 43rd Street and Broadway wearing a blue shirt and carrying a yellow sign. He might ask if you like stand-up comedy. If you say yes, he’ll whisk you three busy blocks west—dodging tourists and hurtling past the corpse of the Virgin Megastore—before ushering you down a dingy flight of stairs under Sweet Caroline’s Dueling Pianos. The club down there—Ha! Comedy Club NYC—is anonymous and unheralded.
"Where's the fucking cap for this thing?” It’s a few minutes until show time and Marc Maron is pissed. Flanked by a half-empty pack of nicotine gum and the ever-rotating “Shame Wall”—today featuring, from top-to-bottom, images of Gerald Ford, a bowling Nixon, George W. Bush, a most-likely Photoshopped gun-toting Bush 41 and a surprisingly presidential-looking Ronald Reagan—he shuffles papers angrily around his table, searching for the cap to his highlighter.
You may not know what The Lonely Island is, but you’re probably probably familiar with its members’ work. Or at least its members’ members. The group, which created the infamous, Grammy Award-winning Saturday Night Live Digital Short “Dick in a Box” with Justin Timberlake, has spawned plenty of imitators, but its brand of bawdy, ballsy humor isn’t easily replicated. The Lonely Island comprises Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer—all friends since their formative years growing up in Berkeley, Calif. Moving in together after college, the guys began posting satirical shorts on their website, thelonelyisland.com, buzz began building and, in 2005, all three were offered gigs with Saturday Night Live (Samberg as a player, Schaffer and Taccone as writers). Suddenly, SNL was funny again thanks to the trio’s Digital Shorts (and the Internet even funnier, it seems—the group’s most recent hit, “Jizz in My Pants,” which aired on the late-night institution in December, has been viewed close to 22 million times on YouTube).
In addition to being a bored temp turned unlikely political pundit, David Rees is also kind enough to buy lunch for freelance writers who suddenly find themselves without a day job. “I’m a bleeding heart liberal cartoonist, so I can buy you a sandwich. If I drew Mallard Fillmore, I’d tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and buy your own sandwich,” Rees muses as he opens his wallet and pays for two falafel sandwiches from a lunch truck in Murray Hill. It is an overcast October afternoon and Rees has just gotten out of a recording session for the animated series of his wildly popular
LADIES GOTTA work that shtick. Kathy Griffin attempts to stay on her self-imposed D-List. Sarah Silverman continues to offend with her gross-out girl humor delivered with a kewpie-doll grin.
BY DAY, HELEN Hong is steadily employed as a TV producer. By night, however, she’s a stand up comedian and the mastermind behind a crew of four funny ladies known as “Little Ethnic Girls.” Somewhere in the midst of all this, she finds time to date—and talk about it. “One joke I love doing is the one where I talk about my huge Asian tits, since all the Asian guys I date don’t seem to like big tits.” She volunteers that “huge” for Asian guys is apparently 36A. Much to her chagrin, Hong also has to endure the awesome ethnic guessing game as proposed to her by potential suitors. “I call it racist Jeopardy,” she says before volunteering that her background is Korean. Since another Korean comedian has already made a name for herself in regard to talking about dating, sex, body-image issues and immigrant parents, one has to wonder if Hong is a little miffed at being beaten to the punch.
This week the olds make a comeback.Through the wrinkles of time they say unto us in performance, on stage and in film, We still exist and can fucking school you whippersnappers in everything from dance to writing to film festivals. Its a battle of the generations.
REMEMBER WHEN YOU went trick or treating last Halloween and everybody gave you weird looks? It wasn’t because of your totally ironic Sara Palin as the Joker costume.You’re in that weird and awkward phase where you’re not a kid, but you’re so sick of costume parties that if you see one more girl dressed up as a sexy [blank] you’ll scream.What is there left to do? If you still love the horrific side of Halloween, but don’t want to watch the same old scary movies or take in the scene that house parties can offer, why not try one of these gruesome haunted houses.
Hey, do you want to be in a room full of scary guys with cauliflower ears? Me too! So let’s go to the Javits center where the MMA is hosting its big confab featuring appearances by Wanderlei Silva, Matt Hughes and an assortment of martial arts schools vying for the honor to teach you how to kick ass.
In perhaps the most edifying development in nightlife, Chinese food restaurants are the new superclubs.
Oct. 11, Knitting Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave. (at Havemeyer St.), Brooklyn, 347-529-6696; 8:30, $15.
For those who think of us as effete intellectuals, and for those of us whose mothers wish us to settle down with a nice Jewish boy, this walking tour, put on by Kinky- Jews.com, serves as an effective antidote.The tour transports you back to the days of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep.
Autumn leaves remind us of our own aged form, but this week allows that aging can be done gracefully.Ten years after the Dude was born, he lives on in a bowling alley in Brooklyn. And 100 years after a movement died, its resurrected in the basement of the Guggenheim.
Wally Cardona is definitely shifting the playing field for his latest work, Really Real, and those who go armed with expectations based on other recent works of his may be in for some surprises. This thoughtful, investigative choreographer’s last few pieces filled the stage with numerous objects with which his dancers interacted. These were far more than mere set pieces. His last work to be presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which has commissioned Really Real, incorporated 300 black columns. And in his acclaimed Site, seen at DTW in 2007, the dancers maneuvered 18 large pieces of fiberboard. But this time around, the dancers have the stage to themselves, and Cardona is confronting the possibilities of open space, perspective and distance with the invaluable aid of longtime lighting designer Roderick Murray’s contributions. The work features a score by Phil Kline, performed a cappella by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
Garth Fagan’s musical choices are ever eclectic and surprising. The acclaimed choreographer has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis on several occasions, and has been known to turn to other jazz composers as well. But he is just as likely to turn to Brahms or Dvorak, or composers of various nationalities, past and present. When his Rochester-based troupe returns to the Joyce next week, he will unveil his newest work, set to selections by various Chinese-American composers.
Over six years, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet has quickly established itself as a feisty, independent addition to the city’s dance scene. From the unheard-of luxury of its own comfortable studio and theater space on West 26th Street, to the European choreographers whose work has formed the basis of its idiosyncratic repertory, this company definitely marches to its own drummer.
“I’m the newbie on this program,” Aszure Barton happily admits, referring to her ballet One of Three, which is part of American Ballet Theatre’s program of premieres this week. Both of her fellow choreographers, Alexei Ratmansky and Benjamin Millepied, have made works for ABT (as well as for New York City Ballet) before. But for Barton, a New York-based Canadian whose fresh, inventive works have been increasingly in demand hither and yon, this ballet represents her introduction to ABT.
The performance equivalent of channel surfing, the 92nd Street Y presents over 50 choreographers over two days. Each onehour block includes five choreographers, which means you won’t be stuck with one for more than 10 minutes. Among the standouts are John Jasperse (3 o’clock on Saturday) and Douglass Dunn (3 o’clock on Sunday).
Because their latest work for Big Dance Theater was co-commissioned by the French Institute/Alliance Français and Les Subsistances in Lyon, co-directors Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar began exploring possible French source material. They gravitated to the influential films of the Nouvelle Vague, but instead of renting DVDs, they read the screenplays. They made that their focus, Parson explained recently, “because I felt that stylistically, the films are so powerful visually that there would be no place for me in it. So I wanted some vestige or artifact from that period.”
Lucy Guerin spent much of the 1990s performing and choreographing in New York, before returning to her native Australia. Now we only get to see her work sporadically, and it has been six years she her company last appeared here. The impression left by that 2003 program, at Dance Theater Workshop, was of a choreographer in rigorous control of her material, creating beautifully focused, powerfully evocative works.
Sometimes the word “festival” is tossed around too loosely, but Fall for Dance, City Center’s invigorating celebration of all forms of dance now in its sixth year, more than merits the term. Opening with Savion Glover and Paul Taylor, winding up with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performing Revelations—with Mark Morris, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, New York City Ballet and Morphoses among those included along the way—this two-week event is as festive as they come.
Not until Children at Play has ended does one realize just how much the cast of Jordan Seavey’s promising (but ultimately disappointing) play has done to make the black comedy seem like the best new show in ages. Led by Susan Louise O’Connor, fresh from her rave reviews in Blithe Spirit on Broadway, the eight actors and director Scott Ebersold all manage to smooth over the rough patches of Seavey’s script about life in high school. Not until after the applause has died down does the realization come that Seavey bit off more than he can chew. Among his plot points is the fallout from Chernobyl, eating disorders, teenage sexuality, molestation and the extent to which we’ve failed the next generation. Some of these ideas fit more organically into his story of five gifted and talented students than others (the eating disorder is mentioned with annoying infrequency), but the cast all manage to make the script seem fluid and natural.
Consider Finian’s Rainbow a much-needed palate cleanser. After all the Sturm und Drang this season has already seen (Hamlet, After Miss Julie, A Steady Rain, Memphis), it’s a relief to settle into a seat at the St. James Theatre for an evening spent with a stellar example of the Golden Age of musical comedy.
Every set designer for Off-Off-Broadway should drop what he’s doing and attend a performance of Astoria Performing Arts Center’s production of The Pillowman, which features a brilliant, all-purpose set from designer Stephen K. Dobay. Actually, everyone should drop what he’s doing for a subway ride to Queens, because it seems that shivery, riveting theater has abandoned Manhattan to take up residence in the other boroughs.
ROOTING FOR A couple to overcome their neuroses to be together is almost impossible when one half of them is as downright grating as Allison is in Embraceable Me. Her friend and occasional boyfriend Edward isn’t exactly a prize himself, but he certainly deserves better than the manipulative user Allison reveals herself to be over the course of Victor L. Cahn’s annoying two-hander.
British writers and performers are washing up on the shores of Manhattan over the next two months, and it has nothing to do with splashy Broadway imports that shamelessly show up the weaker American offerings. Instead of the Great White Way, they’ll be taking over the theater complex at 59E59 Theaters for the sixth annual Brits Off Broadway festival, the yearly reminder of just how shockingly talented British theater artists really are.
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