Results tagged “culture”

           

Yesterday, the Apollo Theater celebrated its 75th birthday week by announcing special programming for the upcoming season. Besides its cornerstone Amateur Night at the Apollo on Wednesday nights (tonight's Amateur Night will be a birthday celebration with the first 750 tickets going for just $7.50), a big year is planned, full of concerts, panels, collaborations with other cultural institutions and a revival of a beloved musical.

Like Christian Lorentzen before him, Douglas Haddow deconstructs the hipster in the latest Adbusters cover story. Just as in Lorentzen's Time Out NY piece, "Why the Hipster Must Die," Haddow doesn't really have a solution to the hipster problem, except to allude to the fact that ultimately, one day, their blood will be on their own hands. Until then, they are today's main suspect in the murder of Western Civilization...something that Haddow makes sound so damn poetic.

The half-built condos tower above us like foreboding monoliths of our yuppie futures. I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah [sic] and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise.

Continue reading "Deconstructing Hipsters"

With the writers' strike looking like it'll wrap up this week, Crain's points us towards another problem for New York's entertainment industry.

Kate Sullivan co-anchors CBS 2 News This Morning on WCBS along side Maurice DuBois every weekday morning. She is a native of New England, attended Notre Dame and came to channel 2 in April of 2006 from KATV in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is ranked #57 on the list of biggest television markets. We recently paid her a visit at the studio and asked her some questions.

In early 2007, The New Yorker writer George Packer published an enthralling article about the desperate plight of Iraqis who had assisted the American effort in their country and were being hunted down as a result, with little or no U.S. protection. Betrayed, Packer's first play, is based on interviews conducted while in Iraq for the sixth time to research his article; the fictionalized account concerns three young Iraqis – two men and a woman – whose willingness to risk their lives to help the Americans is rewarded with an indifference bordering on contempt. Following tonight’s performance, Pulitzer Prize winner (and My Trip to Al-Qaeda playwright) Lawrence Wright will join Packer for conversation about the war in Iraq. Betrayed continues through March 16th at Culture Project; ticket prices vary.

Chef Jonathan Waxman is known for many things, but the benchmark of his cooking over the years has arguably always been his roast chicken. The cover of his new cookbook A Great American Cook depicts Waxman slyly drawing a Lavazza espresso cup to his mouth, wood-burning oven full flame in the background and a sliced open cheese pumpkin in front. The book also features the chef’s roast chicken recipe. “My culinary anthem,” Waxman waxes in the recipe’s preamble. “There’s nothing else like it,” we were told by a stranger at a party last week celebrating the release of said book. “You really have to make it,” said someone else, emphasis on really. And so we did (results pictured here).

Two years ago the famed Saturday Night Fever dance floor was sold at auction for $188,000 when the Brooklyn club where the movie was filmed, Odyssey 2001 (later called Spectrum), was closed. Just yesterday the legendary movie turned 30 and amNewYork got nostalgic looking back at the Bay Ridge kid, Tony Manero, who sought refuge on that dance floor.

Thirty years ago this weekend, a tough young kid from Bay Ridge strutted across America's movie screens and struck his finger in the air to announce a new moment in the country's culture. Disco had been bubbling in the underground for a few years before the film came out, opening the sub-culture to a mass audience.

Continue reading "Disco is Dead, But Saturday Night Fever is Stayin' Alive"

Retired football great Jim Brown is the president of a new snack food and beverage company and City Councilman Leroy Comrie is not happy about it. Brown's company is called OG Nation, which Comrie says stands for "original gangster." The company currently markets "King Pin" lager and a line of mixed drinks under the brand "Party Dogg." According to Newsday, Arizona-based OG Nation is also developing a line of potato chips, pretzels, pork rinds, and dips that will be marketed as "Thug Chips."

A look at some of this week's noteworthy television: Spike TV's Video Game Awards 2007 (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., Spike TV) It is the fifth annual outing for this awards show for video games. Live From Lincoln Center: Red Hot Holiday Stomp (Monday, 8:00 p.m., WNET 13) Jazz at Lincoln Center is highlighted with this special hosted by Glenn Close. There will be a program of holiday music and jazz, plus it also features the broadcast...

EVENT: Into anime? It's your lucky weekend, the New York Anime Festival is in town! There will be previews, screenings and panels galore. Check out their website for more details. All Weekend // Jacob Javits Convention Center [655 W 34th St] // $30 day pass, $55 weekend pass SHOP: FIT and the Design Mavens come together for a 3 day shopstravaganza. Tons of designers we're not cool enough to have ever heard of will be...

Filmmaker Ethan Coen has left his big brother behind and written three short plays all by himself. Called Almost an Evening, the triptych will be produced by the Atlantic Theater Company with a terrific cast that includes Elizabeth Marvel, who was riveting in Ivo van Hove’s unforgettable revival of Hedda Gabler, and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham. The plays “unsuccessfully tackle important questions. In Waiting, someone waits somewhere for quite some time. In Four...

Moving can take a real toll on the environment. Think of all the cardboard boxes, the truck(s), the frequent opening of doors to climate-controlled rooms and the products and solutions you use to clean the whole place down for the next tenants because you're an awesome person bucking for canonization. Step one on reducing your impact -- the easiest step -- is recycling. And it's not too hard to find earth-friendly cleaning products. But...

SHOP: Tonight head to Dumbo for an “Evening of Cheer,” where three neighborhood events coordinated by the Dumbo Improvement District will be taking place. "The night’s events combine Dumbo’s monthly cultural event, First Thursdays, with extended shopping hours and promotions by local retailers and the illumination of the Empire Stores in Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park by famed lighting designer Brendon Boyd." 6pm // Various location details here EVENT: Tonight some experts gather around to celebrate...

An exhibit at the main branch of the New York Public Library is drawing outrage from Republicans because some of the work on display depicts former and current members of the Bush administration posing for fake mug shots. Each official in the visionary series, called “Line Up”, is seen holding a slate with a date of arrest corresponding to a date when the official said something about Iraq that was not “reality-based.” Matthew Walter,...

MOVIE: BAM pays homage to the late Barbara Stanwyck tonight with a screening of Forbidden. The 1932 Frank Capra-directed film (which tells the tale of a librarian who has fallen for an unobtainable/married man) was supposedly influenced by his real-life affair with the leading lady. Critic and historian Elliott Stein will discuss the film after the 6:50 screening. 4:30, 6:50 and 915pm // BAM Rose Cinemas [30 Lafayette Ave., Fort Greene] // $11 Meanwhile, the...

Last Sunday and Monday a collective of activists, journalists, retired government officials and theater makers gathered at The Culture Project to begin mock impeachment proceedings against President Bush. The “trial by theater” arose in part out of frustration with Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s pledge to leave impeachment “off the table” when her party seized the House majority. The month long series, called A Question of Impeachment, is intended to spark debate and, participants hope,...

As noted earlier today, a number of consumer activists, sweatshop protesters and anti-capitalist agitators have for years been working to turn Black Friday into Buy Nothing Day. Spearheaded by the anti-advertising gadflies at Adbusters, the event calls on individuals to suspend purchases for 24 hours and engage in creative activism to highlight the unsustainable patterns of mass consumer culture. Naturally, New York’s anti-corporate performance icon Reverend Billy is all over this. We spoke with...

The New York Sun is reporting that the operator of the midtown Japanese restaurant Naniwa has been arrested for trying to bribe a city health inspector in order to avoid a summons. Kazuo Mitsuya allegedly tried to slip the inspector $200 to make the restaurant’s violations just go away. Presumably offended by the low sum offered, the inspector got on the horn with the Department of Investigations, who sent in an undercover officer posing as...

Elizabeth Currid's new book, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, posits that the city's culture is the key our fiscal well-being. With insights culled from many of New York's leading players in the worlds of art, fashion and music, she draws a detailed blueprint of how these creative processes become big-money industries. Currid's thesis is that the conditions that have made New York one of the cultural capitals of...

SFist witnessed a new apartment building tszuj the skyline with spectacular, gaudy turquoise aplomb, the (informal) renaming of the Mission/SOMA neighborhood border, the return of the Maltese Falcon, the Mayor Gavin Newsom mea culpa-ing over his Hawaiian getaway during the oil spill, and double-decker buses hitting the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and some baseball player named Barry Bonds is a liar whose pants, it seems, are totally on fire.

In The Brothers Size, three shirtless black men struggle for scraps of peace and prosperity under the blazing sun of some unnamed, dirt poor southern town. Ogun and Oshoosi Size are two recently reunited brothers – the older, more responsible Ogun has taken Oshoosi in after he’s released from prison. Oshoosi makes a halfhearted go at rehabilitation working at Ogun’s auto-body shop, at least until the appearance of his old jailbird buddy Elegba, who surfaces...

NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews Jean Nouvel's future 75-story tower at 53 West 53rd Street, describing it as "the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation." He compares Nouvel's latest to the Woolworth, Chrysler and Seagram buildings. Filling a 17,000 square-foot vacant lot next to MoMA, the structure will be the future site of a developer Hines' 100-room hotel and 120 "highest-end" (Hines' words) luxury apartments. MoMA, which sold the lot...

New York seems to have a love/hate relationship with the branded beanery Starbucks (their seasonal Peppermint Mochas sure are tasty, but their sterile generic storefronts keep the siren's call muted). While the local mom and pop collects our $3/day coffee allowance, there are plenty lining up at the corner 'Bucks for their daily buzz. Alas, there is now a book to appease the haters and the adoring herds of the establishment. Taylor Clark has gone...

It's hard to say what enigmatic actor Crispin Glover is best known for: Back to the Future's George McFly? His role in Charlie's Angels? Almost kicking David Letterman in the head? If Glover has his way, he'll ultimately make his mark with his trilogy of films exploring the ways in which the monolithic American movie industry systematically excises various taboos from cinema. The first film in the series, the surreal non-narrative What Is It?, employed...

In Ryan Seacrest is Famous, his debut collection of pop-culture enthused short stories, Dave Housley makes you think, makes you laugh, and, if you're a writer, inspires you to run to your computer and get started on that premise you've been putting off. Whether it comes in the form of an alcoholic clown, people obsessed with Fight Club, or a DJ hiring a prostitute in an attempt to win back his old flame, Housley's stories...

A look at some noteworthy television this week: Art in the Twenty-First Century (Sunday, 10:00 p.m., WNET 13) Four artists - Robert Adams, Mark Dion , Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Ursula von Rydingsvard – who explore the intersection between nature and culture. Billy Crystal: The Mark Twain Prize (Monday & Thursday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13; Saturday, 7:30 p.m. WLIW 21) Billy Crystal receives the tenth annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in...

If you’ve ever spent a day working in an office, you'll immediately recognize Beverly Wilkins, the titular character in The Receptionist, Adam Bock's darkly comic study of corporate culture in the age of Cheney. Beverly, played here with spellbinding hilarity by Jayne Houdyshell, is the polite but potentially nasty gatekeeper for the "Northeast office" who, when she's not gossiping with friends and her coworker Lorraine (Kendra Kassenbaum), puts callers through to her boss's (Robert...

a good idea, no matter what side of the law you're on. A 14-year-old boy was throwing eggs at cars in Staten Island when two police officers decided to teach him a lesson. Police sources S.tell the Daily News that Officers Thomas Elliassen and Michael Danese picked up Rayshawn Moreno around 8:30PM, drove him to "a swampy area of the 122nd Precinct" and then "dropped him off wearing only boxer shorts and socks and left." Moreno had to walk to a Burlington Coat Factory, where a security guard called his parents.

ART: Duke Riley brings his latest exhibit, After the Battle of Brooklyn: East River Incognita II, to Magnan Projects. Starting tonight and showing through December 22nd, the works imagine New York during the Revolutionary War and "interweave historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories. His re-imagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of overdevelopment and gentrification of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies as well as commerce and the role of the artist in society and at war."

Donna Henes has been bringing peace to New York for decades as an Urban Shaman (you didn't know we had one?), and tonight she is charged with leading the Halloween parade. How does one woman handle all of this responsibility? We recently asked what her job entails, both on and off the parade route.