A horse lover living within New York City's confines, I'm resigned to petting police horses in reminiscence of my childhood. (There's a police horse that hangs out on Broadway near Houston who's best trick is kissing ladies' hands.) But there is a light.
Starting Saturday and lasting until next January, "The Horse," a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, will show the "enduring bond between horses and humanity." The horse's role in history has been monumental, and visitors will understand so after learning how these gorgeous animals were used in warfare, work, sports, spirituality and more.
Opening day on Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. will feature none other than Thumbelina, the world's smallest horse (that's her on the right)! I'm totally there. More to come.
We found this collection of 50 images of album covers - and they've been dubbed the "50 Worst Album Covers." But we're not sure sure about that, "worst" is so subjective. And we're still laughing at this one:
So you tell us -- are these the best of the worst, the worst of the worst, the best of the best?
William Shatner, 77, is truly unique, from his staccato vocal pattern to his numerous memorable acting roles to his contributions to the musical world. There’s just no one like him.
Listen to Scott's conversation with Shatner [HERE].
He plans to turn the structure into a giant musical instrument for his "Playing the Building" installation.
Byrne is calling the project a "sound sculpture" and it's all about visitor participation. The centerpiece will be an antique organ (below) that controls devices attached all over the place, from ceiling beams to water pipes - which will vibrate and trigger harmonic vibrations.
The piece will run from May 31 - Aug. 10, Fri. - Sun, Noon til 6 p.m. at 10 South St., and it's Free!
More than one giant Hello Kitty figure, actually. They are the work of artist Tom Sachs, known for his eccentric artistic explorations of consumerism, and also a strange fascination with the saucer-eyed cartoon Hello Kitty cats.
He even created a Hello Kitty nativity for the Barney's holiday window in 1994.
These cats are part of a show at the Lever House on Park Avenue at 53rd Street, and are displayed in the open-air street-level space. There are two 10-foot fountains that appear to be crying visible to passersby in vehicles or on foot. And without further ado, a look at the Park Ave. cats:
Artist Jason Polanis trying to draw every person in New York.
He may have already drawn you. He could be drawing you right now. He's started a blog to document his progress on this behemoth of an art project, posting simple line portraits as he finishes them. It's appropriately titled "Every Person in New York."
He's always drawing, according to the blog, on the subway, on the street, in museums. Everywhere. But come on, there are 8 million people in this town, so it's understandable that the guy wants some help. He wants to draw you. So if you'd like your likeness sketched, zap him a note at: art@jasonpolan.com
Here is Polan's plea for subjects, and instructions on how to meet up:
"If you would like to increase the chances of a portrait of YOU appearing on this blog please email me a street corner or other public place that you will be standing at for a duration of two minutes (I will be on the corner of 14th street and 8th avenue on the North-east corner of the street from 2:42-2:44pm this Thursday wearing a bright yellow jacket and navy rubber boots, for example)."
Additional instructions: Give him 24 hours notice, and don't go out of your way in case he can't be there. Work those two minutes into something that's part of your normal routine -- he might not be there -- or he might be, and you just may not notice.
It's a huge ambition - but if anyone can do it, we think Polan can. Our pals at Boing-Boingnote he's already drawn every piece of art in the MoMA.
And what better do you have to do this weekend than become part of a living work of art?
As a long-time New York resident and actor, Chris Noth loves the city. But he has one major issue.
“I think we shouldn’t give over to what I call greedy, unscrupulous builders,” Noth said at a recent press event for the “Sex and the City” movie, in which he reprises his role of Mr. Big.
Noth wants people to pay more attention to neighborhoods’ characters and historic icons, mentioning his support of a movement to keep the 13th Street Repertory Theater alive and his distaste for many of the gigantic new structures going up around the city.
“It wouldn’t hurt the mayor to realize that they made a lot of money building these buildings and they might want to keep an eye on what the character and essence of this town is. It’s neighborhoods. Its smaller businesses and smaller buildings,” Noth said. “I don’t necessarily think a glass tower that’s 40 stories high [is representing that]. We’re not Dubai. Were New York.”
What does he really miss? Stoops and coffee shops — traditional meeting places.
Guess there’s still the movie theater, albeit most likely an AMC or Regal.
All photos: Helen Levitt, published by powerHouse Books, used with permission
Think you’ve seen a lot of changes in the urban landscape? Helen Levitt has photographed an ever-changing New York for more than seven decades.
Long-vanished corner luncheonettes, neon “liquor” signs and second-floor button-and-notion shops are still readily accessible through her work. These old-time urban institutions and the people who frequented them are immortalized in a square, record-album-sized volume (Helen Levitt, powerHouse Books, 2008) recently released in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition at Germany’s Sprengel Museum Hannover.
An unsentimental souvenir of a grittier city, the collection includes images from the 1930s to the early 1990s. Before Starbucks and Duane Reade storefronts punctuated Manhattan, Levitt chronicled Sabrett’s hot dog cart awnings, old-time Coca-Cola signs and kids who amused themselves with tricycles and cast-off picture frames.
The stage is set in a yawning hall in Grand Central, the judges panel comprised of Arts for Transit people and often local musicians (in past years we metCorey Gloverof Living Colour on the panel) -- yes, it's the annual auditions for Music Under New York.
Every year street performers show up lugging dozens of different kinds of intruments from just as many countries. You get amatuers, self-taught protiges and and even polished Julliard grads, all vying to be part of the MTA's program to promote music underground.
The evaluation is based on more than talent: They have to have a sound that will rise above the roar of city transit, and they have to come equipped with a self-contained amp system. No outlet plugs allowed.
The auditions are going on today until 3:30 p.m. and anyone passing through Grand Central is free to watch. In the meantime, here's a video and photogallery from a past audition:
Crews Friday afternoon were taking down the last of the scaffolding from 2 Columbus Circle, revealing the only distinct architectural feature that survived the building's epic overhaul -- Ada Louise Huxtable's lollilops. Well, they belong to architect Edward Durell Stone, of MoMA and GM Building fame, but former New York Times architectural critic Huxtable gave us that great label. Those lollipops -- or, OK, columns -- at the base are now covered in glass, preserving the building's namesake element. Smart move.
But the marble Venetian palazzo of which she wrote so famously in the 1960s has been utterly extinguished. And in its place, well, you decide. The original structure was one of those buildings New Yorkers loved, just loved, to harsh on. We may well have been guilty of said crime during our less forgiving moments. After all, buildings should be judged in part by how successful a home they are to tenants, and 2 Columbus Circle never excelled in this respect. What it needed was a tenant who could appreciate its role in architectural history, its charms, and yes, its quirkiness.(That whole "portholes, but no windows" thing was a nonstarter for most folks, except perhaps for Verizon switching-station technicians.) That proved to be too tall an order, and time ran out for 2 Columbus Circle.
We were expecting more, much more, given the fevered debate over this building's future. At this point, we can say this much with authority: 2 Columbus Circle now blends in perfectly with its sleek neighbors, looking right at home with the Time Warner Center and the reclad Trump Tower across the way.
The circle is corporate, clean, and now, complete.
-- Rolando Pujol
Note: If you haven't yet read the first architectural review of the new 2 Columbus Circle, click here. And this comment thread on Curbed is not to be missed. Here's Urbanite's previous 2 Columbus Circle coverage.
It wasn't quite close to midnight, but the dancing zombies a la Michael Jackson's 1983 blockbuster "Thriller" were out in force at the Tribeca Film Festival Thursday night.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the album, and the John Landisfilm that documents the making of the iconic video of the walking dead, the cast of Bravo's "Step It Up and Dance" re-enacted the video and the crowd joined in. We'd say more, but the video says it better.
Today is the sixth annual Poem in Your Pocket day, so if you've got a few eloquent stanzas stashed away, head to Bryant Park this morning for a reading at 11 a.m.
"Poem in Your Pocket Day" is part of the city's April National Poetry Month.
Very cool new show up at the British Museum in London called "The American Scene" that features lithographs and prints from the late 19th to the mid 20th Century. The one above, called simply "New York," by the Ukrainian born Precisionist Louis Lozowick. He emigrated to the U.S. in the mid 1920's where he became fascinated by "the verticals of its smokestacks, the parallels of its car tracks, the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks"
A never-before-seen photo of Elvis Presley taken by legendary music photographer George Kalinsky is displayed on a billboard above the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. (Jefferson Seigel / April 9, 2008) Elvis Presley performs at Madison Square Garden in this June 1972 photo provided by George Kalinsky. Kalinsky, who has been the official Garden photographer for more than 40 years, came across the never-before-seen photos while looking for images for a publicity campaign called "Great Moments in New York." (AP Photo/From the Lens of George Kalinsky)
Attention New York Elvis fans (and lovers of leisure-suits everywhere): a larger then life photo of the King from his 1972 concert at Madison Square Garden has landed atop the Virgin Megastore in Times Square.
The photo is apart of a number of images taken of Presley by legendary photographer George Kalinsky that have not been published before.
Kalinsky came across the photos while looking for images for a publicity campaign called "Great Moments in New York."
The photos will be displayed at Graceland starting Memorial Day weekend as part of "Elvis Jumpsuits: All Access," a fashion exhibit featuring more than 50 of Elvis' famous stage wear jumpsuits, according to the Associated Press.
Dave Eggers ("What is the What" author and Salon.com writer) shows off his artistic side with "Lots of Things Like This," a show he curated for the apexart gallery.
The collection, comprised of more than 100 works by nearly as many artists, boasts three common elements: an image, some words and a sense of humor. Think Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," but with more modern artists (Leonard Cohen, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Hornschemeier among them). Some works are offensive and some look just like doodles on napkins but all are meant to have you chuckling. Lots to take in.
"Lots of Things Like This" runs through May 10. Check out Friday's amNewYork for Scott A. Rosenberg's extended review of the show.
Two quick observations after the news that Cablevision won't move Madison Square Garden to the back of the Farley Post Office.
First, Madison Square Garden -- for now -- survives. They'll rehab it, just as they did in the early 1990s after dropping a plan to move farther west. Today's MSG isn't widely beloved, but heck, we have a weakness for its spherical, brutalist, space-age vibe. Today's iteration is thefourth complex bearing that name.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan outside the building that may one day yet bear his name. (Getty)
Second, the Farley Post Office is left alone. Damaging the integrity of a McKim, Mead and White building in this neighborhood would seem to invite bad karma. They were, of course, the creators of the original Penn Station, itself knocked down for today's MSG.
We'd still like to see Moynihan Station happen. The kernel of the idea seemed good enough, before it morphed into the project that would consume midtown.
This weekend we checkout Urbanite fave Glowlab's show at the Leo Kesting Gallery in the Meatpacking District.
They turned over the top half of the space into a one-woman exhibition by Beka Goedde, a Brooklyn based artist whose training is in neuroscience.
Her pieces are these exceptionally delicate, intricate renderings of anonymous cities, imagined places where urban life is both scrambled and fragile.
She says, “I am building a house around myself. I am able to sense my movement in surrounding space. I contribute to the surrounding space my interior architecture, by transferring my sense of movement to the movement of physical material. The intimate space spreads outward systematically and geometrically, growing into structures and forms. It shoots off further than I can reach with my hands, hangs higher than where I can focus, dwells behind the reach of light.”
Here's a few more:
Also, for what it's worth, it's still possible to find flanks of skinned cows near the gallery.
After a vigorous fan campaign, the Mets came to their senses and agreed to save -- kind of -- the Apple that has graced Shea Stadium since 1980. We hedge because they've only committed to having an Apple presence at the new Citifield -- not necessarily our favorite Apple.
But what about The Bat at Yankee Stadium, that most cherished of meeting places? Newsday's Anthony Reiber couldn't get a firm answer about the prospects for the 120-foot-tall Louisville Slugger. Will it be kept in place, moved to the new stadium, get demolished or be auctioned off? It's anyone guess at this time.
Maybe it's time to launch a "Save the Bat" campaign, before it's too late.
Well, anyway .. it was .. and a new tree is set to start growing in Brooklyn today.
In honor of author Betty Smith'sbeloved novel about a poor young Brooklyn girl who works hard and makes good, the city's parks department will today - in honor of the book's 65th anniversary - plant a serviceberry tree outside the Brooklyn Public Librarybranch believed to be the inspiration behind the 1943 story, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
Click here for directions to the Leonard Branch, located at 81 Devoe St. at Leonard St. near Metropolitan Ave. in Williamsburg.
Smith was a Brooklyn-born gal herself and her daughter is slated to speak at the tree-planting ceremony at the Leonard Branch. Smith died in 1972.
I've never read On the Road, and assumed Kerouac was one of those self-absorbed ARTIST types (you know, like those all talk/no talent kids on Project Runway).
It turns out not only was he rigorously literate in a way none of today's hipster writers are--the NYPL says he devoured the works of "William Blake, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wolfe"--but he was also profoundly interesting.
I say the latter mainly because of his devotion to fantasy baseball.
One of those mysterious architectural street oddities just got a lot more valuable. This post (anyone know its long-ago function?) at 17th Street and Eighth Avenue in Chelsea is now a work of art worth an estimated $94,000. Good luck carting it away.
Over the weekend we trekked out to the Gowanus to finally make our first visit to Issue Project Room, a recently relocated space in the Old American Can Factory to see the haunting James Blackshaw and the magnificently chill duo Mountains.
Great show, but equally as cool was finally making it out to Issue Project and seeing that the place has landed on its feet again after losing their old Grain Silo spot. As the Times reported last year:
Perhaps the biggest wow factor lately comes from seeing a show at a former oil silo on a stretch of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Occupied for the last two years by Issue Project Room, an experimental arts organization, the silo is hidden behind an imposing metal gate with a small sign just off the Carroll Street bridge. Between the lapping (if occasionally stinky) water, the courtyard filled with poplar trees and the warm glow emanating from the two-story performance space — the top floor is reached by an exterior metal ladder — it’s as far from mainstream clubland as you can get.
Rebecca Moore, a singer and violinist active in the protests over the closing of the Lower East Side club Tonic, performed at the silo last week. “I am very grateful for Issue Project Room,” she said from the stage: a rug at the front of the room. “We couldn’t get away with playing staplers at many other places.”
And that’s exactly the point, said Suzanne Fiol, the founder of Issue Project Room. “We are trying to be a breeding ground for experimental work, and we need spaces like this to nurture it,” she said.
And the old factory is a great spot, built over 100 years ago and with a courtyard and long spooky hallways and cool doors. We can't wait for the rooftop films this summer.
A choir sings “Jesus is gay” and that the Virgin Mary was “raped by angels.” Jesus is introduced as “the hypocrite son of the fascist tyrant on high.”
These are just a few moments in the comedic musical “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” which will run next Wednesday and Thursday at Carnegie Hall. But a Catholic civil rights organization isn’t laughing, crying blasphemy over a show that has been stirring controversy for several years.
“It’s an all-out assault on Christianity,” said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League. “The way Jesus and our blessed mother are talked about is completely unconscionable. It’s mind-boggling that this would pass at humor.”
The real Jerry Springer is the inspiration for the main character but has no official connection to the production.
Donohue said he is just as outraged by the content in “Jerry Springer,” which stars Harvey Keitel as the famous TV talk-show host, as he is that Carnegie Hall, a New York cultural icon, is allowing the show on its stage.
Carnegie Hall spokeswoman Synneve Carlino said the venue was “standing by the booking.”
“This is a show that has been produced in London and elsewhere in the U.S.,” she said. “It’s been well received by critics and audiences, won prestigious awards and has been broadcast nationally on BBC television in the U.K.”
The show made headlines in Britain last year when a Christian group sought criminal prosecution of a theater producer and an executive for the British Broadcasting Corp., which telecast the musical in 2005. The High Court ruled last month that the show did not violate blasphemy laws.
“It’s a very funny show, and it’s a shame to put in this perspective entirely,” said David J. Foster, a producer for the musical. “Certainly, the show does have things to say about the nature of chat shows and what they do in our culture. … No one’s setting out to criticize religion.”
Donohue said he doesn’t expect to halt next week’s performances and isn’t calling for government censorship — he recognizes the producers have a First Amendment right to stage the musical. But he said he fears that if he doesn’t call attention to the show’s racy subject matter now, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” might eventually seek a home on Broadway, just as it did unsuccessfully in 2004 before financial problems killed the show’s chances. Foster denied that “Jerry Springer” was using Carnegie Hall as a stepping stone to Broadway.
Said Donohue: “This kind of art is nothing but hate speech and has no legitimate role to play in any venue in New York City.”
Joseph Davis, a Catholic who works in Manhattan and lives in New Jersey, agreed.
“I just think even if you’re not Christian, if you’re Jewish or Muslim, you shouldn’t accept this type of religious bigotry because it certainly wouldn’t be accepted if it was a play or production that was offending Jews or Muslims.”
From the artist who brought the world a life-size sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth, comes a new equine-themed work depicting two horses that met a tragic end.
The first, shown on the left, is Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who was euthanized last January because of deteriorating health. The other horse is Smoothie, a Central Park carriage horse who died last September after running into a tree. Smoothie had been spooked by the drum of a street musician.
"Racing horses live a painful existence that has no good end,"sculptor Daniel EdwardsamNewYork on the phone today. "People buying horse tickets are essentially contributing to this painful life, and the same goes for those who ride in horse drawn carriages."
Although not quite as controversial as a naked Britney, show below, or some of his other work, like an autopsy scene of Paris Hilton and the bust of Hillary Clinton, also below, Edward's "The Barbaro Memorial" should generate some buzz when it is unveiled in Central Park this April.
After all, a local law to ban horse-drawn carriages is currently in a City Council committee, and a federal law in Congress would require all racetracks to post information about every horse deaths or injury that occurs there.
Man, be glad you don't (like amNY sports editor Max)
live at 475 Kent. Residents stood out in the cold today waiting to get the last of their things after the Fire Dept. discovered they were living above a matzo factory.
I, by chance interviewed Eve Sussman, who lives in the building and is a fabulous artist who was the darling of the Whitney Biennial a few years back. She was super-nice, though reeaallly angry about all that had happened in the last few days. She said you can’t make art and live in New York City any more. “All the artists I know are moving to Berlin,” she said. “This city is using artists like it has for the last 30 years, to clean up neighborhoods so that the developers can move in.”
We wrote about this here
Calling all closet bards!
