Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Music Listen to Two New Modest Mouse Tracks from Sasquatch
Posted by Sydney Brownstone on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:19 PM
Can it be? Are "Poison" and "Lampshades" products of the mysterious, Big Boi-produced Modest Mouse record in the works? Well, there's nothing overtly Big Boi-ish about the tracks, but the energetic, bumping, twangy and (whew, thankfully) old-school Modest Mouse sound does seem to fit in with Big Boi's description of the joint effort as a "hodgepodge of funkiness."
News You Can Get a Passport at the Library
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:40 PM
News NYU Follows Its Students, Moving to Brooklyn
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 2:48 PM
Among the many, many places near and far on NYU's long list of expansion projects, the most welcoming continues to be Downtown Brooklyn, where the Greenwich Village institution's engineering school, the Polytechnic Institute, already owns four buildings and has just signed a 20-year lease on more office space at Metrotech Center.
Special Events The L Mag hosts The Real L Word Season 2 Launch Party Tomorrow Night!
Posted by Sydney Brownstone on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 2:00 PM
What do L.A. lesbians and The L Mag have in common? Tomorrow night! In solidarity with the letter L, The L Mag, Showtime and The Human Rights Campaign are proud to host The Real L Word's Season 2 Launch Party at the Knitting Factory tomorrow, Wednesday, June 1 from 8-11pm. The event will feature a preview of the show as well as free wine from San Dominica. Did we mention prizes?
News Bomb Squad Swoops On Atlantic Avenue Station
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 1:12 PM
Sounds like the work of a rascally hobo.
Art Brooklyn Museum Has City's Highest Ratio of Twitter Followers to Visitors
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:20 PM
Well here's a fun infographic that doesn't reveal much of anything: based on numbers collected in mid-April, Museum Nerd assembled this charticle (full version after the jump) comparing the attendance numbers of 50 New York City Museums to their number of Twitter followers. Leading the pack is the Brooklyn Museum, which with 212,000 followers and 325,000 visitors has the highest follower-visitor ratio (65 percent). So what?
News Signs and Piers for East River Ferry Spotted in North Brooklyn
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 11:29 AM
Still don't quite believe that the long-rumored East River commuter ferry is launching within a month? We can't really blame you, it's always seemed like a fantasy, but look there are real signs and nearly-finished piers more or less at the places where they are supposed to be! Above, two signs point to the in-progress India Street pier (after the jump) where New York Waterway's new service will stop in Greenpoint.
News NYPD Bike Ticket Blitz: There's a Map for That
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 10:41 AM
Bike lane battles notwithstanding, the biggest story in New York City biking this year has been the NYPD's crackdown on bike laws—some real, some not—which has so far resulted in a 48 percent increase in cyclists' tickets this year. Where are most of these tickets being given? To the map!
News Prospect Park, Now with More Swans
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 9:50 AM
Books The L Mag Questionnaire for Writer Types: Tracy K. Smith
Posted by Mark Asch on Tue, May 31, 2011 at 8:58 AM
For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Robert Hass introduced a reading I gave at UC Berkeley a few years back, and he described my work as being about “Saudade, the longing for place, for love, for order, for a morally comprehensible universe.” That sounds about right to me.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Food & Drink What Are YOU Drinking This Memorial Day Weekend?
Posted by Keith Wagstaff on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:09 PM
We all know that the most important part of any weekend, especially Memorial Day weekend, is drinking. That's why we asked 10 beer, wine and cocktail experts what they'll be imbibing over the long weekend. Skål!
Jimmy Carbone (Beer Guru, Owner of Jimmy's No. 43): This weekend I'll be prepping for Brewers PicNyc on Governors Island, so I'll be sampling some previews of summer beers. Nothing beats a good pilsner like Sixpoint Sehr Crisp or a refreshing wheat beer like Sly Fox's Royal Weisse!
News Long-Promised Bushwick Inlet Park Still Years Away from Completion
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 2:22 PM
Bushwick Inlet Park, you may or may not recall, is that stretch of the North Brooklyn waterfront between North 9th Street and Meserole Avenue (or between East River State Park and the House of Vans, if you prefer), the rehabilitation and parkification of which was one of the major bargaining chips in the 2005 rezoning of Greenburg that paved the way for the massive waterfront towers just to the south and other projects of that ilk. Condos have risen and are now inhabited, but what about the park the city promised?
Literary Upstart: Meet Your Wild Card Finalists
Posted by Mark Asch on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 1:35 PM
This year, in a new wrinkle, we'll have five finalists: our three semifinal winners, and two Wild Card selections. You can hear all of this year's readers performing their stories here, on the Upstart website, which has just been updated with this Wednesday's five readers (as well as host Jonny Diamond's impromptu riff on audience etiquette.
We're pleased to announce this year's Wild Cards:
Art It's Also Blockbuster Season at the Galleries
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 12:50 PM
Earlier this week we likened the huge exhibitions the city's museums have mounted this summer to blockbuster movies, but as happens every year, there's also an incredible set of (free) museum-quality shows at the city's art galleries right now. Here are some of this year's biggest summer blockbuster exhibitions at galleries.
Film Hangover II: Phew, Everyone in Asia Speaks English
Posted by Benjamin Sutton and Henry Stewart on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 12:01 PM
SUTTON:
So, Henry, a few things have changed since the first episode of Todd Phillips's day-after dudetectives gross-out comedy: bros Doug (Justin Bartha), Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) are in Thailand for the latter's wedding; the baby has been replaced by an Indiana Jones-y monkey; and the original's hooker with a heart of gold has been replaced by a hooker with a penis. Thus we get more gay jokes, more offensive caricatures of Asians—including a visit to a monastery that's the Buddhist equivalent of blasphemous—and more of grown man-children nearly killing a tiny, frail being. Tellingly, though, the monkey eventually leaps into the line of fire, ostensibly to take a bullet for one of the dudes, but more likely to put itself out of this miserable, miserable sequel. I would do the same if I realized the "wolf pack" and I shared so many chromosomes, wouldn't you?
Film On Miami Blues, Charles Willeford, and Fantasies of Comic Criminal Fantasies of Upward Mobility in the Reagan Years
Posted by Nick Pinkerton on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:16 AM
Charles Willeford’ s signature style—the depths of vice, violence, and perversion, observed with an observational comic's eye and described with the same deadpan delivery devoted elsewhere to To-do List banalities—developed away from the light of an appreciative public. Publishing since the pulp days, Willeford was never able earn a living from fiction until, shortly before his death, he received fat advances and a measure of fame. Willeford was even asked to write a script for Miami Vice; he submitted a storyline where Crockett came out of the closet.
That Very Special Episode shelved, Willeford’s Miami would be realized on-screen when an adaptation of his Miami Blues began filming in fall, 1988. The author had died that spring.
Film Your Memorial Day Weekend at the Sequels to Mid-Level Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 10:32 AM
News Construction Collapse in Park Slope
Posted by Henry Stewart on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 9:47 AM
No one was hurt in the accident, and nearby structures seemed to suffer only superficial damage at worst.
Art Photos from Sol LeWitt's Posthumous Sculpture Show in City Hall Park
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Fri, May 27, 2011 at 8:55 AM
On Tuesday a large crowd gathered at the southern tip of City Hall Park around a large, pyramid-like stack of white aluminum cubes, one of 27 pieces in the Public Art Fund's museum-caliber outdoor exhibition Sol LeWitt: Structures, 1965-2006. Curator Nicholas Baume spoke, as did Mayor Bloomberg, while the late minimalist and conceptual artist's widow and daughters stood by shyly. The exhibition, on view through December 2, is very good, as you'll see in this slideshow.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Film FilmAfrica at BAM: Restless City and Gorgeous Possibility in African New York
Posted by Elise Nakhnikian on Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:01 PM
Living in New York is like going online: When you know you can find a world-class example of whatever or whoever you long for if you just look long enough, it’s hard to stop searching. Most of us zigzag between curling up in whatever niche we’ve carved out for ourselves to enjoy the moment a bit and hunting for something more, either online or IRL. Restless City makes that duality its subject, alternating between its main character’s ceaseless travels through this often hostile or indifferent city as he tries to establish himself and his delight in its capricious generosity and moments of unadulterated grace.
The niche Djibril (Sy Alassane) occupies is a hustling, bustling underground economy created and populated almost entirely by African immigrants. A musician who dreams of making it here, he starts his journey on Canal Street, part of our growing army of Senegalese street merchants, but soon graduates to courier. The community he moves in is a large, mostly nurturing world, and Djibril floats through it beatifically at first, meeting, greeting, and eating as he goes. Then he falls for a gorgeous prostitute, Trini (Sky Grey) and his life starts to take a predictable slide toward tragedy. But even as the plot turns pedestrian and predictable, the look and feel of the movie remain sumptuously evocative.
