Saturday, April 30, 2011
Film On The Bank Dick and the Brilliance of W.C. Fields's Sozzled, Petulant Line Readings
Posted by Miriam Bale on Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 11:55 AM
WC Fields is pomposity underplayed. He's also a reckless spectacle of of competition, cowardice, brutality, sexism, sloth and slapstick. In other words, Fields is America. Fields is also always drunk.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Art / News Giant Earthen Vagina Coming to Governors Island Next Month
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 4:06 PM
Every summer Governors Island plays host to a bunch of temporary art and architecture installations; one previous installment was creepy, and this year's will be dirty. Architect's Newspaper reports that a domed pavilion formed from earthen strands has won the Figment City of Dreams Pavilion design competition, and will make its debut on the historic New York Harbor land mass starting May 27. What does it look like to you?
Special Events Photos from Last Night's ACT 4 at New York City Opera with Jack Daniels and Science Experiments
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 3:22 PM
Last night marked our final Act 4 after-party at the New York City Opera where, following a performance of Seance on a Wet Afternoon the Secret Science Club conducted live science experiments with our well-dressed, Jack Daniels-sipping guests. We took these pretty photos of the fancy meeting between art and science.
Slideshow
Film Tribeca 2011: Tripping Out with Beyond the Black Rainbow
Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 2:47 PM
And Here's Some Photos and Audios from Wednesday's Literary Upstart, Ahead of Our May 1 Submission Deadline
Posted by Mark Asch on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 1:54 PM
The submission deadline for this year's Literary Upstart, The L's short fiction competition and reading series (sponsored by Harper Perennial and the New School), is this Sunday, May 1. So if you have any intention of submitting, we'd love for you to do so.
The last semifinal is on Wednesday, May 25, at Spike Hill. The second semifinal was held there this past Wednesday night, as you can see from this slideshow below. If you missed the reading, or simply want to relive it, you can also listen to all five of the stories here, on the Upstart website; included is the winning story, "A Walk on Easter Parkway," by Eliza Snelling, and four possibilities for the Wild Card finalist, to be announced after the 5/25 reading.
Slideshow
Music Video: Behind the Scenes at the 8 Bands You Need to Hear Photoshoot
Posted by Mike Conklin on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 1:30 PM
At the photoshoots for this year's 8 Bands You Need to Hear feature, in addition to making bands stand around all awkwardly in front of a white backdrop as we took their picture over and over again, we also made them stand there and answer all the dopey questions being barked out by the rest of us as we drank beer and ate gummy worms. Lou Gruber was there to film the whole thing. Enjoy.
Art Brooklyn Museum's Forthcoming Graffiti Exhibition Earns Insulting Daily News Editorial
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 1:10 PM
Over in Los Angeles, former Soho gallery mogul Jeffrey Deitch's historical survey of graffiti and street art at MOCA, Art in the Streets, has brought on a massive wave of graffiti and street art all around town—and attendant arrests. In a hateful Sunday editorial the NY Daily News suggested that the likelihood of the same happening here, when Art in the Streets opens at the Brooklyn Museum next March, is reason enough to cancel the exhibition.
Theater So Far Off-Broadway It's in Park Slope
Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 12:23 PM
News Trader Joe’s Tomatoes a Target of Sunday’s Labor Protest
Posted by Sydney Brownstone on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 11:31 AM
Reyes started picking fruit in Central Florida at 11 years old. Now, 33, he is a labor organizer for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a union that’s helped bring nine cases of modern slavery, involving more than 1,200 farm workers, to justice. The CIW has also picked fights for workers’ rights with some of America's most powerful food corporations—like McDonald's, Burger King, Aramark, Yum Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut) and Whole Foods—and won. But Reyes has come all the way from Immokalee, Florida to pick a fight with one more food provider: Trader Joe’s. And that fight is literally over one penny.
Film Your Five Fast, Five Furious Weekend At the Five Fast, Five Furious Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 10:41 AM
As goes Chucky, so goes Vin Diesel, only a little bit more lumbering, because Diesel's triumphant (by which I mean profitable) return to the Fast and the Furious franchise, 2009's fourth installment Fast & Furious, was a bit of a dud: a couple of great stunts in between a whole lot of the usual cops-n-crooks and street-racing bullshit. But get this: in Fast Five, director Justin Lin actually cuts away from street-racing bullshit. The big race to win some awesome (and plot-irrelevant) souped-up car happens off-camera. This is because Fast Five completes the franchise's transition from gritty street-level B-movie to car-chase/heist series. It's a smart move: this is the best Fast/Furious movie since the original, and easily the most fun of the series.
Food & Drink A Look Inside Breukelen Bier Merchants in Williamsburg
Posted by Keith Wagstaff on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 9:50 AM
More than 500 beers by the bottle! Sixteen beers on tap! Old-timey spelling! Yes, Breuklelen Bier Merchants, open since last week in Williamsburg, has it all. Not only can you grab a quick mix-and-match six-pack or a growler to go, you can also drink right there in the store, sipping one of the American craft brews by the pint, half-pint or flight at one of the 26 seats set at the big picnic tables.
Owners Denise Kubovic, Renee Esposito and Greg Golembiowski are also opening the backyard in a month or so, meaning you can sample your beer in the sun before taking it home with you. Drunken freelancers can also take advantage of the free Wi-Fi. The kitchen serves up a variety of locally sourced snacks, from pressed sandwiches on ciabatta bread filled with things like Salvatore's smoked ricotta and caramelized onions from Brooklyn's Plan B Foods to Bavarian pretzels topped with spicy mustard from Schaller & Weber on the Upper East Side.
Art After Fire, Open Source Gallery Mounts Show in Burned-Out South Slope Brownstone
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 8:57 AM
Last November a fire at 17th Street and Fifth Avenue in Park Slope destroyed Open Source Gallery's small storefront space, and badly damaged co-owners Monika Wuhrer and Gary Baldwin's adjacent home. No matter: they turned the construction fence into a poster gallery, launched a pop-up in Greenpoint and, this week (with an assist from co-curator Frank De Leon-Jones), turned their badly damaged home into the massive, wonderfully intimate and incredibly rich site-specific group exhibition Associated with works by friends and artists who've shown at Open Source.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Books PEN World Voices: "There's just too many books."
Posted by Larissa Kyzer on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 4:18 PM
“I read a lot of novels—only great novels. I attach no importance to novelty, so I’m actually very liberated.” So explained, via interpreter, the dignified and elegant French author Laurence Cossé, a former journalist and bitingly satirical novelist of numerous works of fiction, many of which are available in English. Her most recent novel to be translated, A Novel Bookstore, is deeply interested with the process of taste-making for the erudite—the manner in which the serious reader of discrimination selects the novels that will occupy her time. This makes for an interesting topic of conversation, particularly when in discussion with the multi-talented Hervé Le Tellier, who besides working as a linguist, food critic, teacher, and mathematician, is also the author of over a dozen works of poetry and fiction, and a member of the famously selective, playfully avant-garde French literary collective Oulipo.
Art Guggenheim Prize-Winner Hans-Peter Feldmann Putting Prize Money on the Gugg's Walls
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 3:29 PM
Last November German conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann won the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize, a distinction whose two major perks are a solo show at the Guggenheim, and $100,000 with which to create said exhibition. Feldmann's plan for that cash? Use it as wallpaper.
Sex Shocking News: Will.i.am is a Creep
Posted by Audrey Ference on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 2:44 PM
- Elle
ELLE: If you walked into a woman’s house, what one item would convince you that you weren’t compatible?
W: If she had condoms in her house, that would just fuckin’ throw me off. That’s just tacky.
News Red Hook Ikea Assembles Brooklyn's Biggest Solar Panel Installation
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 1:56 PM
Oh, Red Hook Ikea, we just can't figure out your environmental agenda. On the one hand there are buses and boats going right to your door, on the other hand you have that huge parking lot and traffic in your vicinity has increased over 300 percent. You opposed a new bike lane, but gave your employees bikes. You probably were (not) responsible for last summer's Red Hook oil spill. And now you have Brooklyn's biggest solar panel installation!
News NYPD Now Ticketing Cyclists Who Don't Ride in Bike Lanes
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 1:14 PM
In what appears to be another calculated move to piss off the city's cyclists—one possibly precipitated by an "investigative" Post piece focusing on the intersection of Prince and Lafayette streets in Soho—the NYPD has begun handing out tickets at said intersection. But not for riding in the wrong direction, or running lights; for not riding in the bike lanes.
Film BAMcinemaFest Announces Full 2011 Lineup
Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:27 PM
Bullet points: opening night is the NYC debut for the film I'm most kicking myself over missing at SXSW, the gay romance Weekend; closing night is French actor Mathieu Amalric's burlesque road movie Tournee, finally playing here after debuting at last year's Cannes; the sole world premiere is Wild Style director Charlie Ahearn's documentary portrait Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer. Plus the NYC premieres of the latest from up-and-coming young Brooklynites Sophia Takal (Green) and Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel), and hopefully a fair amount of titles that should be familiar from SXSW (including a couple that will also play Rooftop this summer), including two of the best documentaries at the festival, Dragonslayer and Where Soldiers Come From. (The one repertory title thus far announced is a new print of Whistle Down the Wind, a Christ parable from future Stepford Wives director Bryan Forbes.)
The full lineup—featuring 25 new films to last year's 19—with premiere status courtesy BAM, after the jump.
Come see The Secret Science Club at the Final ACT4 of the season this Thursday
Posted by Sarah Shanfield on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:00 PM
News White People Move to Bed-Stuy, Demand Police Protection
Posted by Henry Stewart on Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 11:01 AM
To put it more bluntly: now that white people live in Bed-Stuy, there seem to be a lot more cops around. But not in a "neighborhood occupation" way, like in the old days.
"When white people come in, they bring more money, which gives the city more resources," a veteran officer (and black male) told the Bed-Stuy Patch, off-the-record. "They also complain, write, speak up, and say ‘we have a problem over here.’ White people are going to file complaints; black people aren’t."
