They’re still creepy and they’re still kooky. The upcoming Addams Family musical shared backstage interviews and a cast photo with Vanity Fair, proving that the actors will stay true to the undead hilarity of Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoons.
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Dia Art Foundation's director, Philippe Vergne, announced today that Dia would construct a new space in Chelsea and finally have a more visible NYC presence. The new site in West Chelsea will be located at 545 W. 22nd Street. The address is currently the location of the large, versatile Pace Wildenstein space. Galleries such as D'Amelio Terras are across the street. This is the first time in the organization's 35 year history that it has elected to construct a new building.
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Actor Harry Connick Jr. was on Australia’s version of The Gong Show when a group called Jackson Jive came on featuring five guys in blackface and one man in whiteface playing Michael Jackson. If reading those words didn’t make you disgusted, just watch the video, complete with a crowd of Aussies cheering along, and see where that gets you.
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A housing complex near Ohio State University is calling itself the East Village. By the time this blog is posted, NYU plans to own half of it.
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The Sad Panda, the bear who the Gothamist noticed moping around Wall Street, mysteriously disappeared in the beginning of the summer. And while gone, he was never forgotten!
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The IFC Center is more than just midnight screenings of the Buffy musical episode and an outlet for the eponymous cable network to show off its wares to an adoring public. It's also a favorite date spot for the intelligentsia and arthouse film snob. And so it will soon, perhaps counterintuitively, expand to have two additional screening rooms at their Sixth Avenue spot.
John Vanco, vice president and general manager of the IFC Center, told the NYTimes that the theaters would be used primarily to keep successful films for longer runs. "That’s been a frustration, that we’ve had some really successful small films that we’ve had on calendar for a week or two weeks, that will do huge business, but then have to go to make room for the next one,” Vanco told the Times.
This is at a time when the Film Society of Lincoln Center is still undergoing extensive renovation with the Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center, and we are seeing more and more niche programming. Perhaps that's the way to keep these small, indie cinemas afloat. Build it and they will come.
Of the mass of people congregated outside the Empire State Building yesterday afternoon, 20 or so were not tourists being mesmerized by the light show creating red and yellow hues on the sight-seeing institution. They were protestors. And they were not protesting what they saw as the blatant overexposure of the New York landmark for the sake of tourism, but rather what they saw as a blatant nod to communism.
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It's great the city claims to want to help artists out. Who doesn't want to help an artist out? But is it really that amazing when part of the plan is to decorate the Brooklyn Army and St. George Ferry terminals? Crain's reports that the Bloomberg administration is putting resources into local arts support:
"The new programs will give visual artists a chance to display their work in various city-owned properties, including the Brooklyn Army Terminal and St. George Ferry Terminal; provide free outdoor performance space in the city's parks; train 50 out-of-work entrepreneurial professionals to apply their skill sets to the nonprofit cultural world; help artists develop business plans and provide them with low-cost studio space; and provide $25,000 grants to each of two neighborhood “arts clusters” to help organizations draw audiences."
The low-cost studio space is probably the most important item on the list (the re-training sounds a bit dubious), but we're interested to see what sort of "art" is going to be hung to please the tourists...