Tim Schreier

“The world is too much with us,” claimed William Wordsworth, but he didn’t know the half of it. The Weather Channel is too much with us, would be more to the point. Mayor Bloomberg is too much with us. Anderson Cooper is too much with us. Fox News is too much with us. Warnings and dire threats of all kinds are too much with us — e.g. those surrounding “Hurricane Irene,” who/which would have been more accurately described as “Subtropical Depression Irene” by the time she managed to waddle her way up the East Coast in her rain-soaked skirts and finally “hit” New York with the soft, wet slap of a gloved hand. As trees swayed gently and reporters valiantly swallowed their disappointment, we were all far too invested in the story to evacuate the portion of our brain in which she’d taken up residence.

Well, she did rain a great deal. And knocked down some trees and flooded this highway and that subway, but a “hurricane” she was not. Nonetheless she managed to take up most of my weekend – mentally speaking. And by the time she finally cleared town I was flat-out exhausted by her. For two days I had obsessively followed the event-to-come, watching TV, scanning Internet sites, constantly checking The Times’ “Hurricane Tracker” and all the latest updates from FEMA, only to discover that it was all foreplay and no conclusion. Read more…

If Hurricane Irene threw a wrench in your plans to attend the final performances of Fringe Festival, fear not: The lineup of encore productions has just been announced. The 18 shows, set to run from September 9 to September 26, include “Facebook Me,” which was well received by The Lo-Down last week. Update: Some of the shows canceled over the weekend have been rescheduled for September 1 through September 4 at the Laurie Beechman Theater in Midtown.

Good evening, East Village.

Angela Cravens, a community contributor at The Local, has shared her photos of the neighborhood preparing for Hurricane Irene earlier today, and we want to see yours, as well. (By the way, she tells us a sign posted at Villa Della Pace tells Irene, in Italian, to go do something very not nice.) If you have anything to share with your neighbors now that the rain has driven you indoors (Gothamist has the latest on what to expect now that the Category 1 hurricane is 300 miles away), leave your comments below. Have a longer story that you’d like The Local to post? E-mail the editor. Have photos? Join The Local’s Flickr group, and we’ll add them to the gallery above. And feel free to alert us to any developments (no matter how large or small) via our Twitter page, if that’s your preference. We’re listening.

Elsewhere around the Internet, everyone from the Guardian in the U.K. (which noted lines down the block at Trader Joe’s) to the usual neighborhood blogs were eying local supermarkets today: EV Grieve reported that the Associated on Avenue C was primed to set a single-day sales record, and posted photos from Key Food and Fine Fare. A manager at Key Food told the Wall Street Journal of “chaos” there (the store was already running low on certain supplies when we checked in on grocery stores yesterday). Read more…

As we noted earlier this week, David Godlis (known simply as Godlis) began photographing at CBGB in 1976. He has captured some of the punk scene’s most influential artists, including The Ramones, Patti Smith, and Deborah Harry.

Joey Ramone – St.Marks Place, 1981. Read more…

Tim Schreier

Getting ready to brawl over the last flashlight in the hardware store like the folks at the Village Voice? The Local is here to help. In the last few minutes we called up grocery stores in the neighborhood and asked for the rundown of bare essentials still in stock. Our very informal survey was conducted with whomever answered the phones at around 4:30 p.m. Read more…

At a press conference addressing Hurricane Irene this afternoon, Mayor Bloomberg issued a mandatory evacuation order for residents of Zone A, which as this PDF map indicates, includes areas of Alphabet City (Bowery Boogie has an East Village and Lower East Side detail of the map). All affected residents are ordered to evacuate by 5 p.m. tomorrow. Subways, buses, the Long Island Railroad, and Metro-North will cease operation at noon tomorrow as well.

Gothamist quotes Mayor Bloomberg as saying,  “Nobody is going to get fined and nobody is going to go to jail, but if they don’t evacuate they could die.” Read more…

Painting by Lucian Bernhard

Dentists are always memorable. Anyone who gets paid to poke around in your mouth is bound to be.

I have had two dentists in the East Village. The first was a man from the Indian state of Gujarat who chewed obsessively on the carcinogenic Indian palate-cleanser known as paan. I will call him “Dr. V.” He is gone now, put out of business after his landlord doubled the rent on his miniscule store-front clinic in Alphabet City. This was a minor tragedy for the neighborhood, for if you had a rotten tooth and no insurance – even no money – Dr. V was your go-to guy.

Dr. V had learned dentistry in India under what he called “the British system,” which he held in high regard, although his feelings about the British themselves were mixed. He was a man of small, delicate stature, about 60 years of age, and had lots of opinions and was keen to share them.

Most of the time, a dentist is someone to whom, by definition, you can only listen, not speak – your side of the conversation being confined to gagging sounds that you hope will not involve drooling. So it helps if the dentist is entertaining. (I did once have an East Village dentist – only briefly, thank God – who talked about nothing but the minutiae of politics in Albany. That was truly abysmal.)

Dr. V.’s conversational canvas was large, and he would lay down the law on every subject imaginable. But I felt he cared about me. He always gave me advice, seemed to look into my mind and soul as much as my mouth, and often he made me laugh – if not always on purpose. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown Jim Power works on a new mosaic for the soon-to-open Tompkins Square Bagels.

The Local spent some quality time with Jim Power yesterday, and the  Mosaic Man let us in on a few of his upcoming projects. Mr. Power is in the process of designing mosaics for Porchetta, the new Tompkins Square Bagels coming to Avenue A, and the soon-to-reopen Exit 9.

The neighborhood’s beloved public artist was as humble as ever.

“I’m doing the city a favor with all this stuff,” Mr. Power said while taking a break from work in his basement studio. “I’m making this neighborhood one of the biggest landmarks in the world.”

That might sound arrogant, if it wasn’t for the fact that many people agree with him — including his customers. Read more…

Though she plays a high-powered studio exec on that most L.A. of television programs, “Entourage,” Constance Zimmer’s heart really belongs to the East Village. Ms. Zimmer — along with her husband, the director Russ Lamoureux, and their three-year-old daughter — divide their time between the West Coast, where work typically calls, and the East Village, a neighborhood that she feels “still has what makes New York New York.”

Here, she loves finding and frequenting “those little shops that have been there for years, and thrive because they’re local.” Though her sharp-tongued character Dana Gordon takes a bow along with the final season of  “Entourage,” look for Ms. Zimmer on the season finale of “Royal Pains,” and in the bawdy comedy “The Babymakers,” due next year. Until then, you just might find her at one of these favorite spots. Read more…

Stephen Rex Brown

Police officers, construction workers, and The Local had their cell phones out for a photo op just minutes ago. The driver of a TNT Transportation bus taking an advertising firm on a company outing attempted to make a turn from Crosby Street onto Houston Street. Road barriers made the move tricky, so the driver improvised. A 29-year-old employee of the advertising company, who declined to give his name or the name of the firm, said, “The driver tried to take a shortcut. Because of the construction, he couldn’t make a turn and he got stuck. He looks like an idiot.” Have another look at the scene below and see if you agree. Read more…

Jenn Pelly

Perennial indie-rock darling Stephen Malkmus, best known as the frontman of Pavement, is performing at Other Music tonight, playing acoustic songs off of his new release “Mirror Traffic” (NPR is currently streaming the album). The store will close at 8 pm for the 9 pm performance, after which Mr. Malkmus will sign copies of the LP. Other Music’s Website predicts that “this one is guaranteed to be a madhouse.” No one had started lining up as of 5 pm, but don’t be surprised if the line grows to look something like the above one for a Superchunk in-store last year.  If you’re a Pavement fan and you don’t make it in, you may want to walk a couple of blocks over to Great Jones Cafe, where the band’s bassist, Mark Ibold, still puts in shifts as a bartender.

Eva OstrowskaSamantha Glovin as a café waitress and Andrew W. Hsu as Liao Chen in “The Fourth State of Matter”

In “The Fourth State of Matter” by Joseph Vitale, directed by Robert Angelini, a brilliant Chinese astrophysics student studying at an American university has murdered his beloved academic mentor, an eminent cosmologist. Loosely based on shootings at the University of Iowa in 1991, the play explores the genesis of this tragedy, finding parallels in cosmology and its exploration of the universe and its origins.

Played by Andrew W. Hsu, Liao Chen is a stranger adrift in a foreign land, dealing with the effects of his mother’s mental illness and the threat of fierce competition from fellow students for academic honors. These particles making up Chen’s existence culminate in the murder around which the play is set — the cataclysmic Big Bang, so to speak. Read more…

The suspect in the July slaying of a homeless man in Union Square is expected to be cleared of charges, DNA Info reports. The 29-year-old man, Keenan Bryce, was charged with brutally beating the homeless man to death with a bike lock and chain. But Mr. Bryce’s brother refused to accept that his mentally ill sibling was guilty, and through a good deal of research was able to prove that Mr. Bryce was in New Jersey during the time of the murder.

Tim Milk

With the threat of another recession looming large in the markets, I can’t help but recall another steep downturn, long ago; a terrible time when work was nearly nonexistent. By the summer of 1979 most young people were broke as a joke. But this was not true of a friend of mine, who will hereafter go by the name of “M”

Until M busted a move to help me out, I didn’t have a single prospect. But I had been told, in hushed and reverent tones, that M possessed a secret method of raising cash. M by and by revealed what it was, an absurdly simple scheme, diabolically clever. It involved selling all the joys and sorrows of the world for nothing more than pocket change.

It was the world of the newsboy. Read more…

Angelo Fabara David Yow

Fuse Gallery, behind Lit Lounge, has seen its share of musicians moonlighting as artists. Among others, the space has hosted artwork by the likes of Hank Williams III, Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, Nick Zinner and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Conrad Keely of …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

Last night, David Yow held court at an opening reception that drew J.G. Thirlwell, the lead singer of industrial band Foetus, as well as other admirers of Mr. Yow’s bands, The Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid. Mr. Yow, best known for vocals that alternate between mumbling and shrieking as well as onstage antics that at one point got him arrested for indecent exposure in Cincinnati, was polite and soft-spoken. He was dressed down (or perhaps up — he has been known to favor the shirtless look, after all) in a button-down shirt and spectacles.

When Erik Foss, the owner of Fuse Gallery, bought a painting titled “Go Figure,” depicting an erect penis, Mr. Yow texted his girlfriend, “I have tears in my eyes.” She responded, “I love you. Stop crying.”

The Local sat down with Mr. Yow to talk about his new calling.
Read more…

NYPL The Bowery in 1895.

Lately, the Bowery has started to look more like Dubai and a whole lot less like a poor man’s Broadway. But for at least three hours on Sunday, old-time songs will echo on the street once again, as a connoisseur of vaudeville songs and a historian lead a walking tour of music from the Bowery’s heyday. Bree Benton, accompanied by a viola and accordion, will sing songs like “My Brudda Sylvest,” and “Yiddle On Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime” (which was written by one of the former Lower East Side’s most famous sons, Irving Berlin.)

“The songs are so full of life, they really speak to the people — the common people,” said Ms. Benton, who will play the character of Poor Baby Bree, a down-and-out kid from the Lower East Side. “People who couldn’t afford to be entertained on Broadway; they went to the Bowery.” Read more…

Good morning, East Village.

If caffeine just isn’t cutting it, dive into the above homage to Erasure that East Village resident Jason Stein, a founding partner in Laundry Service Media, created with kids from The Hetrick-Martin Institute (home of Harvey Milk High School on Astor Place). This video has been floating around for a while, but only gets better with age.

While Zagat Buzz hears that a Williamsburg pizzeria, Forcella, plans to open its outpost at 334 Bowery on September 15, Eater gets word that St. Marks stalwart Café Mogador (a celebrity hangout of sorts) may open its Williamsburg offshoot in September as well.

According to Bowery Boogie, 87 East Houston Street will soon house Bowery Coffee, serving Counter Culture coffee, brownies, and cookies. Meanwhile another coffee shop, Fab Café, got some nice exposure on ABC7’s Eyewitness News, which strangely thinks the East Fourth Street business is in SoHo.

Finally, EV Grieve has a daytime and then a nighttime look at signage for the new Ihop, now glowing on 14th Street.

David Godlis- A photographer and East Village resident from Marit Molin on Vimeo.

For over thirty years, David Godlis, a photographer who got his start shooting punk bands at CBGB, has lived in a fifth floor walk-up at 30 St. Marks Place. After Godlis (who goes by his last name only) moved into the apartment in 1977, a neighbor clued him into its unique back story: It was once rented by Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman. Read more…

State Senator Daniel Squadron and City Councilwoman Margaret Chin urged the Department of Transportation to improve safety on Delancey Street today in the wake of last week’s deadly accident that killed a 52-year-old cyclist. As the Lo-Down reports, the thoroughfare had a reputation for danger prior to the most recent tragedy. Earlier this month, The Local reported that a significant number of the city’s dangerous intersections are on the Lower East Side — of those, most are on Delancey Street.