Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Art / Music Bronx Graffiti Crew Criticizes J.Lo for No Longer Being from the Block
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 3:30 PM
Jennifer Lopez, formerly of the block and the 6 train, now drives a Fiat and won't set wheel in her home borough of the Bronx. So much so that when filming a new Fiat commercial (see below) that uses the streets of her youth as its backdrop, a double did all the location driving. But now the TATS Cru mural and graffiti crew, whose "I Heart the Bronx" mural at Whitlock Avenue and East 165th Street gets substantial screentime in the spot, wants some kind of compensation.
Music None of These Are Punk: The 8 Most Poorly Appropriated "Retro" Band Shirts Currently on Sale This Holiday Season
Posted by Lauren Beck on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 2:41 PM
As the culture enthusiasts at Vol. 1 Brooklyn pointed out this morning, Forever 21 is selling a Flipper t-shirt re-branded for that guy with the toned arms and healthy skin complexion at the top of this post. "Once upon a time it was a punk shirt," Vol. 1 mourns, referencing the San Fransisco band whose logo it copies. "Kurt Cobain made one with a marker and wore it on Saturday Night Live in 1992. " (He wore it a lot, actually.) But it's all good, you see, because it's a throwback and shoppers at Forever 21 will want to buy it for $16.90, and maybe some people will buy it thinking it's a joke on the kids TV show with the friendly dolphin, which would be great for business, wouldn't it, hahaha, says a hypothetical Forever 21 businessman. Faux-vintage apparel is very popular these days. Here's our guide to the items which most drastically disregard what the band actually stood for; it mutually functions as a guide to what not to buy the music nerds in your life this holiday season.
News City Deploys Power of Haikus to Promote Street Safety
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:50 PM
Because every other method of promoting civil street behavior has failed—including traffic-calming bike lanes, thickly painted lines, traffic signals of all sorts and even human decency—the city's Department of Transportation has called upon the timeless power of poetry to bring order to the streets. The DOT just launched its new Curbside Haiku campaign, in which artist John Morse combines haikus and vintage-looking road safety designs.
Politics / News Reporter Wins Freedom of Information Suit Against Bloomberg Over Cathie Black Emails
Posted by Mark Asch on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 1:02 PM
At the time, Hernandez was working on a piece about the obvious cronyism that passed for the administration's "public search" for the best candidate, and figured that conversations between Black and the Mayor's office would be illuminating. (Emails sent from government addresses generally constitute official government business and are, with few exceptions, fair game for FOIL requests.) The Mayor's office denied the request under an exemption for "communications that, if disclosed, would result in an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
Music Fort Lean's "Beach Holiday" Gets the Video Treatment
Posted by Lauren Beck on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 12:01 PM
Referring to "Beach Holiday" previously, the lead track from Fort Lean's very good self-titled EP (available here for free), we made note that despite frequent references to a "beach holiday," the song is not aggressively beachy. Lifting the vocals off the track for a moment, it actually has a lot in common with Vampire Weekend's acutely orchestrated pop. But lead singer Keenan Mitchell's careening shouts are very much present, of course, turning it into a youth-grasping party anthem. Since CMJ, all sorts of people have been saying really nice things about these guys, making it an opportune time to release a video for the aforementioned song. Filmed in Emily's Pork Store of ye olde Williamsburg, it's a nice complement to the band's "screw it, let's go for it" energy, whatever "it" may be. (It will actually make you want to have a beach holiday.)
Be on the lookout for a show at Music Hall of Williamsburg on December 16 with Bear Hands and a LP sometime next year.
News State and Federal Transpo Officials Pull Funding from Bare Bones BQE Fix
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:20 AM
Remember how in April we were all like, "well, there's a $20 billion proposal to put the BQE underground from Sunset Park to Greenpoint, and a $2 billion version where it goes underground from Brooklyn Heights to Fort Greene, and even though state and federal transportation officials probably won't do either at least they'll pony up a couple hundred million for minor fixes"? Well, now they won't even do that; state and federal transportation officials have just rescinded $254 million in funding for crucial (though cosmetic) repairs to the 160,000-cars-per-day triple-cantilevered stretch beneath the Brooklyn Heights promenade.
Film Arthouse Deep-Freeze in The Hunt, Tonight at Scandinavia House
Posted by Mark Asch on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 10:32 AM
The existential chill of haute postwar international cinema—the bare, shimmering black and white surfaces and the beautiful, opaque posed people of Hiroshima or Marienbad—becomes a literal, environmental deep-freeze in The Hunt, from 1959, Norway's own contribution to the genre.
In the film, a husband, wife, and their best friend stalk birds in the rolling, frosty scrub of the Norwegian countryside, piercing the air with whistles after their roving, poised hunting dogs. The film opens in flash-forward, with a coffin being carried away from the hunting shed, and the three are introduced by a busybody narrator who asks, not quite rhetorically, whether the wife and friend have already become lovers: in successive close-ups, the husband sneers, the wife is aghast, and the friend panicked. But the love triangle is bundled up for much of the movie, as if in fear of the decisive action foreshadowed with every jolting gunshot.
News Brooklyn Navy Yard's New Supermarket and Industrial Center Get City Council Approval
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 9:46 AM
It's been a long, dramatic journey for the city's redevelopment project at the southwestern-most corner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, aka Admiral's Row, including crumbling historical buildings, a bribery scandal, and fighting between federal, state and city officials. But following yesterday's thumbs-up from the City Council the project—which will see all but two historic buildings torn down to make way for a manufacturing center and supermarket—only needs the Mayor's signature before it starts to take shape.
News "New York Today is Populated By More Russian Jews Than Any Other Place in the World."
Posted by Henry Stewart on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 8:57 AM
“By any account, the number of Russian-speaking Jews in the United States now probably exceeds those of Russia and Ukraine combined,” said Kliger, a sociologist who is director of Russian community affairs at AJC. “New York today is populated by more Russian Jews than any other place in the world.”
"It might seem obvious to those of us that live in Brooklyn’s southern stretches," adds Ned Berke at Sheepshead Bites.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Music Yup, Jeff Mangum Adds a Third Show at BAM
Posted by Lauren Beck on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 4:01 PM
Tip: If I learned anything from the emotional roller coaster trying to score tickets to those first two shows at BAM, it's that their website is kooky. It wouldn't let me click on "purchase" after filling out the required info fields. Stick with it though. It eventually worked, and I imagine will be well worth the hassle come the cold, dark days of late January.
News CUNY Votes to Pass Cost of Ineffective Leadership On to Students
Posted by Henry Stewart on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:31 PM
- NYT
- CUNY used to be free.
The first increase already took place for this term; CUNY raised the price after its bills were already due, forcing students who had already paid up to pay a little bit extra if they still wanted to attend classes.
Music PopGun Booking Is Giving Away a Year-Long Show Pass Again
Posted by Lauren Beck on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 2:49 PM
Film New York Film Critics Circle and Gotham Awards Insufficiently Awed by Tree of Life
Posted by Mark Asch on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 1:53 PM
Anyway, the NYFCC moved their voting date up a couple of weeks, lest they feel a widdle bit wess infwentual than they feel they ought to be. They were originally scheduled to vote yesterday, but it was moved back today and they all went to, I'm deducing, a fairly exclusive embargoed screening of Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. (I was not invited, because I am emphatically not the widely respected Elle film critic Karen Durbin.) A fat lot of good it did: Best Picture went to The Artist, and Best Director to its director Michel Hazanavicius.
Moving up the date also ensured an early NYC screening of The Iron Lady—Meryl Streep won Best Actress for it—as I thought it might, though I also naively thought that the screening would be held through the usual pr channels and that I'd be able to send a writer or writers to it in time for year-end lists and polls and maybe even coverage. Guess not.
Anyway, the rest of the awards!
Music Hear the Source Material for Okkervil River's New Golden Opportunities 2 Covers EP
Posted by Mike Conklin on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 1:08 PM
Art / News Occupy Wall Street Follows Art World to Miami
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:20 PM
While here on home turf the Occupy Wall Street movement's Arts & Culture committee continues to search for permanent studio, exhibition and performance spaces, the movement has also reportedly set its sights on this weekend's annual one-percenter art world clusterfuck in Miami. Rumors are circulating that an occupation is planned for Art Basel Miami Beach (December 1-4), so much so that the weekend's biggest art fair sent participating gallerists a letter yesterday, reassuring them that the situation is totally under control.
Music L TV: Under the Bridge with Brooklyn's Caveman
Posted by Sydney Brownstone on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:34 AM
Art Guggenheim's Cattelan Blockbuster Attracts Record Crowds, Requires Extra Hours
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 10:40 AM
As expected the Guggenheim's dramatic Maurizio Cattelan retrospective All (through January 22), in which all but two pieces the 51-year-old Italian conceptualist and sculptor ever created are strung up from the ceiling of Frank Lloyd Wright's soaring atrium, is bringing in many, many visitors, enough to necessitate McQueen-style extra hours. The blockbuster show is bringing in 33 percent more visitors than the museum was receiving at this time last year, proving once and for all that museum-goers prefer contemporary comedy to an inter-wars historical survey.
Film Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy, Screens Today for All Your Talking-Point Needs
Posted by Steve Macfarlane on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 9:51 AM
Richard Brouillette’s Encirclement is stark diagnosis of a pandemic of neoliberal capitalism (via IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc), positing that its ability to replace capital-P political ideology is key to understanding its pervasiveness. Although it is by no means not a polemical film, its approach couldn’t be further from the Spurlock-Ferguson-Moore-Greenwald school of docs, where every interview doubles as a filmmaker’s personal campaign commercial; Brouillette’s greatest asset is his bottomless faith in the spoken word. Here, he’s assembled a sagacious roster—Noam Chomsky, Ignacio Ramonet, Jean-Luc Migué, Omar Aktouf, and many more—and he fearlessly lets them expound in a passionate, free-flowing conversation on economics, culture and totalitarianism (or, more specifically, “globalitarianism”). It’s heady stuff, no doubt, and even though Brouillette cleaves the conversations into tidy explanatory chunks, the result can be head-spinning.
Art / Talks and Readings Art Historian Hal Foster at The Kitchen: "We Live in the Age of Trauma"
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 8:58 AM
Last night Hal Foster, Princeton professor and 20th century art historian, spoke at The Kitchen in Chelsea and read from his two new books, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha and The Art-Architecture Complex. The soft-spoken historian, author and editor of innumerable volumes that appear on art history syllabi the world over, began humbly: "It's bad enough to have one book coming out, but it's really embarrassing to have two."
Monday, November 28, 2011
Sex What Happens When the Internet Sees Your Orgasm
Posted by Audrey Ference on Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 4:18 PM
