Photos: Tim Schreier

It’s The Hole’s most ambitious installation yet: With funding from an unlikely patron – Playboy – the Bowery gallery has transformed into a fecund, fragrant landscape complete with a bridge and lily pond in the back corner. The indoor recreation of Monet’s garden in Giverny was partly inspired by performance artist and longtime East Villager, Kembra Pfahler, best known as the lead singer of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.

At a preview of the exhibit earlier today, Ms. Pfahler, looking vaguely occult in black eye makeup and a hood, sprinkled potpourri over a cluster of flowers that had been transplanted from Long Island. “I’ll learn to water them,” she promised, “because I do not know a thing about plants. Being in this garden last night was the first time I’ve been around plants like this.”

Not exactly true: in August 2011, Ms. Pfahler traveled to Giverny, France, to be photographed by E.V. Day in Monet’s famous garden estate, where the photographer best known for exploding couture was enjoying a residency. Read more…

Ukrainians are known to celebrate Christmas a bit late, so why not nod to Easter early? Tomorrow the Ukrainian Museum concludes its month-long exhibit of pysanka (lavishly decorated eggs) with a colorful demonstration. From 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., artists will use dyes and beeswax to adorn raw eggs, to the accompaniment of a 14-minute documentary about the art of batik. The Local attended a recent workshop and got tips from one such artist, Alexandra Lebed. Warning to those who get hungry easily: Ukrainian Easter food was served. 

The Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation has announced that it’s now accepting nominations for its annual Village Awards, which, on June 7, will once again honor “those people, places, and organizations which make a significant contribution to the quality of life in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo.” Honorees have traditionally trended west, but past winners include the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, Porto Rico Importing Co., St. Mark’s Bookshop, the Amato Opera, CBGB, and the Merchant’s House Museum. Who would you add to the list?

Vanessa Yurkevich The former of home of “Lucky” Luciano at 265 East 10th Street.

Before there were squats, there were social clubs. And before pricey restaurants began taking over East Village storefronts, many were gathering places for the mob.

Every Friday and Saturday night Gideon Levy, the founder of NYC Gangster Tours, gives a tour of these onetime crime scenes, clandestine casinos and fronts for drug smuggling operations.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Mr. Levy’s obsession with mob history started in 2003 when the film “Gangs of New York” inspired him to organize his tours, one of which winds through the East Village.

“Walking through neighborhoods that are familiar, that you might walk by every single day, you might not know about a thread that leads back to smuggling or a murder,” said Mr. Levy during a recent tour. Read more…

Photos: Daniel Maurer, Stephen Rex Brown

Yesterday The Local spotted a fake throwback subway entrance being built on the corner of Bleecker and Mott Streets and today the Coen Brothers are using it as a prop for their film “Inside Llewyn Davis.” Moments ago, they were filming a scene in which the movie’s titular folk singer, played by a bearded Oscar Davis, ducks into a vintage car. Sprinklers were used to simulate rain, and ice on the ground simulated melted snow.

As in previous scenes, Llewyn was clutching a fake cat and a guitar case. During one take, the car only drove forward a few feet (not quite as impressive as a checkered cab coasting down Ninth Street), but there should be plenty more chances for action – the Coens are filming in the neighborhood through Friday.

On Monday, just a couple of weeks after Occupy Wall Street’s Illuminator rolled through the East Village, the neighborhood’s walls were lit up once again. This time the art wasn’t political: it was created by Dawn of Man Productions, a collective specializing in guerrilla projections. Check out their far-out, far-up work in The Local’s video.

Kathryn Doyle Douglas Light outside of the building
that inspired “East Fifth Bliss”

With “The Trouble With Bliss” opening tomorrow, The Local took a stroll down memory lane with Douglas Light, whose novel “East Fifth Bliss” is the basis of the film starring Michael C. Hall, Lucy Liu and Peter Fonda.

An Indiana native, Mr. Light, 43, moved to the East Village in 1995 and lived for a year at 60 East Third Street while working as a waiter at what is now Bondst. Some mornings, he awoke to the sound of a Hell’s Angel cracking a bullwhip in the middle of Third Street. “I guess it would help him get over his hangover somehow,” Mr. Light remembered.

In 1996 he moved to the fourth floor of 343 East Fifth Street, the building that inspired “East Fifth Bliss,” which takes place over the course of one long weekend. “Originally it was about the building, looking into the lives of the people in all the different apartments,” he said. “Then Morris emerged as a kind of lead character and the story became about him.”

Morris Bliss, played by Michael C. Hall, is a 35-year-old who has shared an apartment with his father ever since his mother died when he was 13.

Mr. Light met the director of the film, Michael Knowles, at Velvet Cigars on Seventh Street. The fellow cigar enthusiast read the novel and quickly suggested they make a movie out of it. It took four months to adapt the novel into a screenplay. Read more…

Ruth Spencer Steve Cannon

The founder of Gathering of the Tribes is awaiting a ruling from a Housing Court judge regarding his pending eviction, and is hopeful that his case will be moved to State Supreme Court.

Steve Cannon, the blind poet who runs the freewheeling art space on East Third Street, said that his lawyer preferred trying the case in Supreme Court because it would allow him to pursue a broader legal strategy and avoid the arduous process of staying an eviction through Housing Court. Mr. Cannon was not sure exactly when the ruling would come down.

“Our lawyer thinks that [the judge] is leaning towards taking the case to the Supreme Court due to our unique circumstances,” Mr. Cannon wrote in a newsletter. “Up until this point we weren’t sure how our efforts would be met in the courtroom, but now it seems that the ruling ‘might’ be in our favor.”

Meanwhile, the new exhibition at Tribes is called “Exquisite Poop: Blind Reproduction.” The show places an artist’s work alongside the work of another artist who attempted to reproduce the same piece by only reading a written description of it. Why the name? “I’m not going to comment on that — you know what that means,” Mr. Cannon said.

Sasha Von Oldershausen Women and children hopped over the symbolic fires on Tuesday night.

Iranians from as far away as Houston, Texas crowded into La Plaza Cultural Community Garden on Tuesday night to observe a holiday that celebrates Iran’s pre-Islamic past.

“Chahārshanbe-Sūri,” or, “Red Wednesday,” is rooted in Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions. The holiday, which precedes the Persian New Year, occurs on the eve of the last Wednesday of the Zoroastrian calendar. Since the 2009 elections, the Iranian government has tried to dissuade residents from celebrating the holiday considered un-Islamic, though many continue to celebrate it throughout the country.

Children and adults alike hopped over bonfires lit at sunset to symbolize the passage of the old year.

Simin Farkhondeh, the event organizer, felt a particular pleasure in the gathering. “It’s a celebration of resistance,” she said.

Ms. Farkhondeh has coordinated the event at La Plaza for the past three years. She said the celebration was a way for her to reminisce about the holiday with fellow Iranians, and to share a lesser-known cultural tradition with the community.

“Since I left Iran, I felt a need to do this,” Ms. Farkhondeh said. “I wanted to share something really beautiful.”
Read more…

Fuse Gallery Anton Perhlich in Chelsea in 1979, one of the artists participating in the upcoming exhibit.

Normally, a nosebleed at Lit is just another Monday night. Starting on March 28, it’s art.

“Nose Bleed” is an upcoming exhibition at Fuse Gallery (in the back of Lit) of artists nurtured in the neighborhood. “Nosebleed takes its name from the prevailing motto of that sensibility, that we wouldn’t go up there (up being anything north of 14th Street ) because we’d get a nosebleed,” writes Erik Foss. The co-owner of the bar adds that to him and his cohorts, there is nothing more than “a void” outside of the neighborhood. “Downtown may have been colonized by money and gentrified into something way white and polite, but the attitude persists.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Foss’s own art is on display in SoHo at the Munch Gallery as part of a group show, “Night,” which opens tomorrow. Earlier this week, Ray LeMoine looked back at the illustrious 10-year history of Lit Lounge.

Theater For The New City Elizabeth Barkan as Bobby in “Bike Shop.”

Who knew cycling could be so liberating — and devoid of controversy?

In “Bike Shop,” a one-woman musical showing at The Theater for the New City, Bobby, a bike messenger and mechanic, sings odes to the freedom of the streets. For her, the bicycle is an escape — even a vehicle for feminine liberation.

Set in 1993, this bit of cycling nostalgia takes place in a purer time, before every hipster had a neglected fixed gear hanging in his loft, new bike lanes led to lawsuits, business owners blamed cycling for declining customers and passersby won’t even stop a brazen bike thief.

The songs are campy and catchy, and the writing often amusing to the biker-friendly audience. However, non-cyclists likely won’t find the storyline of two-wheeled redemption as touching.

A charming Elizabeth Barkan, the show’s creator and star, plays Bobby, who works at her family’s bike store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her grandmother, also played by Ms. Barkan, opened the store 30 years prior. The final character onstage is an Uncle Rabbi, and at times the exertion required of the multiple rolls and onstage cycling while singing seems to wear the star of the show down. Occasionally Ms. Barkan would start a song strongly, but by the end had lost her momentum.
Read more…

If you’re looking to take in some art this weekend, head uptown to The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, where admission goes towards the Lower East Side-based Henry Street Settlement.

And if the Upper East Side isn’t your thing, the Brucennial is on Bleecker Street at Thompson Street. Tim Schreier, a community contributor for The Local, recently snapped some photos of that show as well.

Would you like to shoot photos for The Local? Join our Flickr group.

Giuseppi Logan, the saxophonist who made a name playing with John Coltrane and other jazz legends before disappearing for decades, is back in the studio. In a Kickstarter video, producer and folk singer-songwriter Ed Pettersen recounts hearing in 2009 that “one of the most expressive and innovative free-jazz saxophonists of the 60s” was homeless and busking in Tompkins Square Park. “When I heard about this,” he says, “I said I have to find Giuseppi. I have to work with him because he was one of my favorite sax guys.” Read more…

Clayton Patterson pens a long profile of Jim Power for The Villager in which he says the Mosaic Man has “a tremendous capacity for love, kindness and empathy for those who are struggling, or are helping him, or are his friends. Yet, on another day, to the same people, he can be ruthlessly vile, mean and hurtful.” In it, Mr. Patterson advances the theory that the artist’s light poles are a crime deterrent: “Maybe it’s the brightness, the glitter, the enshrined people who cross all color lines, the salute to the workers — the Fire Department, Sanitation, the Police Department — or the historic locations, like the Fillmore pole with famous acts who played there. But for whatever reason — respect, maybe — there is less criminal activity around his poles.”

The folks behind “The Trouble With Bliss” – the movie adaptation of Douglas Light’s “East Fifth Bliss,” about a 35-year-old who still lives with his father in an East Village apartment – have posted a new video featuring clips from the movie and an interview with Michael C. Hall, who stars in the film along with Lucy Liu. Plus: If you download a flyer and get it validated by local businesses like Good Records (featured in the movie), you can enter a contest at select screenings. (Who says East Village film productions don’t give back to local businesses?)

As documented on its production blog, the film, premiering March 23 at Village East, was shot in front of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, STA Travel, Tompkins Square Park, Velvet Cigar Lounge (click here for a 2-for-1 cigar deal!), and various other locations in April and May of 2010. You can see the trailer here.

Jared Malsin MoRUS founders Laurie Mittelmann, left, and Bill
DiPaola, right.

After seven months of negotiations, the creators of the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space have finally signed a lease and are busy fundraising, compiling photos and video, and renovating the storefront inside the legendary collective building C-Squat, where the East Village’s first squatting and homesteading museum will be housed.

The signing of the lease on Thursday with the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board marked the formal launch of the project, which is already staging what organizer Laurie Mittelmann calls “spontaneous tours” of squats, community gardens and other sites of street-level confrontation with police and developers over the control of urban space in the East Village since the 1970s.

On Tuesday, The Local visited the Museum’s dedicated video compiling facility (we were asked not to disclose its location), where two of the project’s 30 volunteers were hunched over computers logging video onto hard drives. (Time’s Up has donated over 400 hours of footage to the museum.) On one video, police were issuing a ticket to performance artist Reverend Billy during a 2006 demonstration.

During our visit, Ms. Mittelmann and co-director Bill DiPaola spoke about their vision and plans for the new museum. Read more…

A new play at Theater for the New City about a bicycle shop encourages the audience to arrive by bike and then park their rides on the stage. “Bike Shop” is a one-woman musical about Bobby, a bike mechanic who tries to get back on her ride after a nasty cycling accident. According to the theater, Bobby “builds and fixes real bicycles onstage while backed up by a four-piece ‘Bicycle Band.'” If you do end up riding to the show, which premieres on Thursday, just be careful when you make turns out of the bike lane. You don’t want to end up getting a ticket like cyclist Evan Neumann, who was so outraged by the citation he received while riding in the Lower East Side that he is suing the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Photos: Tim Schreier

Yesterday we showed you Marquis Lewis, a.k.a. Retna, painting the latest mural at Houston Street and Bowery. Now: the finished work, which has already drawn its share of admirers. That’s Scott Lynch, a contributor to The Local, in the final shot. When you’re done with the slideshow above, you can see his photos of the mural in our Flickr pool.

Photos: Tim Schreier

Marquis Lewis, better known to the street-art world as Retna, has been painting one of his signature hieroglyphic works on the wall at Houston Street near Bowery for the past two days. Our photographer Tim Schreier stopped by yesterday afternoon and earlier today to document his progress. The artist was still at work when we last checked in with him at 6:45 p.m. this evening – we’ll show you his finished mural once it’s completed.

Fun fact: Retna recently participated in the Boneyard Art Project in Tucson, Arizona, for which artists such as Faile (creators of the previous Houston Street mural) and Erik Foss (the owner of Lit Lounge and Fuse Gallery on Second Avenue) made art out of decommissioned military aircraft.

Update: And Now, Retna’s Finished Mural at Houston and Bowery