As a founding member and primary songwriter of the Dictators, Andy Shernoff was a key figure in the downtown proto-punk scene of the 1970s. He and the band released three albums during a furtive period that also saw the rise of Television and the Ramones. Since then, he has worked as a producer and a songwriter, and played in Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom alongside Dictators bandmate “Handsome Dick” Manitoba, the owner of the eponymous bar on Avenue B. The Dictators released a new album in 2001, and Mr. Shernoff contributed significantly to Joey Ramone’s only solo album, “Don’t Worry About Me,” released posthumously in 2002. After a hiatus, he has returned to music with a new single and video, “Are You Ready to Rapture?” The Local spoke to Mr. Shernoff, who will perform a 7 p.m. set at Lakeside Lounge every Wednesday this month. Read more…
A performance of “Golem.”
This month, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater will perform “Golem,” which retells the Jewish legend about a golem created by a revered rabbi to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks.
Vit Horejs, the director of the musical, which features eight performers handling puppets that are roughly four-foot tall, said that the story is a classic in the Czech Republic. He expected a big crowd for the performances, starting Nov. 17 at La MaMa theater on East Fourth Street.
“Every Czech child will know it,” said Mr. Horejs, 61. “People come from all walks of life to see it. A lot of people are interested in Golem.” Read more…
Last night, just a couple dozen people braved the rain and cold to help kick off the first Greenpoint Film Festival with the premiere of Jonas Mekas’s new documentary, “My Mars Bar Movie.” The film, which Mr. Mekas, 88, said he had recorded during trips to Mars Bar over the course of fifteen years at Anthology Film Archives across the street, begins with a close-up of the archivist and filmmaker’s first name carved in the bar, followed by admiring shots of an insect-ridden fly strip and then the first of countless clinking tequila glasses.
Throughout the documentary, Mr. Mekas’s camera darts frenetically – almost kaleidoscopically – from the graffiti on the walls to the ceiling fan to the pinball machine to a cigarette perched in an ashtray (later in the movie, after years have passed, bar-goers complain about having to smoke outside), stopping only occasionally to concentrate on the stoney-eyed female bartenders and the international array of fellow filmmakers and artists that serve as Mr. Mekas’s drinking companions. Read more…
Last week, the annual CMJ Music Marathon descended on the East Village and its immediate surroundings. Todd Olmstead and Laurie Kamens valiantly went a week without sleeping to bring you the highlights, the low-lights, and the psychedelic light shows, too.
Dum Dum Girls
Tuesday, Oct. 18
Wild Flag at Bowery Ballroom
Wild Flag is a sort of super-group composed of Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss from Sleater-Kinney; Mary Timony, former front woman of Helium; and keyboardist Rebecca Cole of The Minders. Their years of musicianship were apparent as the band brought each song to the musical brink only to reel it back in again. All the while, Ms. Timony’s entrancing femme-fatale vocals traded off with Ms. Brownstein’s Patti Smith-like guttural sounds and punk-rock screams. Ms. Brownstein, an electric presence, played her guitar over her pelvis in a phallic gesture to match any 80s hair rocker, strutting around like a mix between Mick Jagger and Iggy Pop. Though the all-female ensemble has roots in the era of post-punk and the riot grrrl movement, the quartet’s attack riffs and lengthy guitar solos were pure machismo, proving that girls can still rock. –L.K.
Eleanor Friedberger at Bowery Ballroom
Eleanor Friedberger’s staccato, matter-of-fact storytelling stood out from all the other performances at CMJ. Known as a member of the indie rock duo the Fiery Furnaces, her solo material pulls no punches. Her husky voice and straightforward delivery lent an attention-grabbing importance to lyrics about her life in Brooklyn and on the West Coast. –L.K.Read more…
Jenni Wolfson is a woman of many talents with a passion for human rights. Scottish born, she’s a onetime resident of the East Village, having lived on East First Street as well as East 13th Street. She will perform her monologue “RASH: What If Your Dream Job Could Kill You?” next month at Theater 80 on St. Marks Place as part of the All For One Theater Festival. The play tells a profound, humorous, and hopeful tale about her 12 years as a UN diplomat – three of which were spent in post-genocide Rwanda.
Q.
Why did you decide to go into human rights?
A.
I am partly wired that way, and the other part was my environment. Growing up, I experienced a lot of anti-Semitism in Scotland. The Scottish Jews were one-tenth of a percent of the entire population. Shocking images of the Holocaust and the direct experience of being discriminated against influenced me. I even went undercover in Russia to help Soviet Jews escape. It was becoming clearer and clearer I would not work for the Royal Bank of Scotland. Read more…
Colorful jeans have been getting a lot of attention lately, but tights in the same hues can add personality and pizazz to a dress or shorts. Check out the trendy tights The Local’s Rachel Ohm spotted around the neighborhood.
Onetime East Village resident Lou Reed’s hotly anticipated collaboration with Metallica, “Lulu,” is now streaming at a Web address we thought we’d never see the likes of – loureedmetallica.com. The album will be released abroad on Halloween (and in the States the next day), but if you think Mr. Reed is off doing the European promotional circuit, rest assured the man who sang about “the boys from Avenue B and the girls from Avenue D” in the song “Halloween Parade” is keeping it real right here in Alphabet City. Here’s a reader’s breathless account of a run-in at Takahachi earlier this week. Read more…
A cultural oddity of the East Village is that it has more often been a home to poets than novelists. Some of the poets (Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden) are about as famous as poets get. Others (Edwin Denby, Bernadette Mayer) are known to only a few. The vast majority, as you would expect, are almost completely unknown.
Weldon Kees, who lived at 129 E. 10th Street (the apartment building directly next to St. Mark’s Church) from October 1943 until November 1945, and later rented a loft at 179 Stanton Street in the Lower East Side, is an exception. As a cult figure with an ardent following, he’s certainly known to some people – but his connection to the East Village has been all but forgotten. Perhaps that’s appropriate: An absence as much as a presence, a shadow where a human should be, Kees is the Harry Lime of modern American poetry, as in the character played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man”: Now you see him, now you don’t. Read more…
As previously mentioned, A Gathering of the Tribes recently unveiled its latest exhibit, “Blind Light,” inspired in part by the blindness of the gallery’s owner Steve Cannon as well as by the concept of synesthesia – when one sense involuntarily triggers another. Here, curators Ana Maria Benzanilla and Deondre Davis reflect on the history of the gallery, exploring what happens when senses and cultures collide.
This weekend marks the end of the three-month run of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and the think tank has an assortment of events lined up to commemorate its closure. Yoga classes, a salon with Clayton Patterson, and plenty of “What have we learned?”-type lectures are scheduled, along with a closing reception Sunday night. Here’s a look back at The Local’s coverage. Will you miss the Lab? The burgers, at least? Read more…
Speaking of East Fourth Street, La MaMa Experimental Theatre is having a blowout block party this Sunday, Oct. 16 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Expect food from Momofuku (which just debuted its quarterly magazine “Lucky Peach”) and neighbor Cucina di Pesce, along with performances by Blue Man Group and a gospel choir. For more, click on the image of the poster.
From Oct. 1 to 10, the annual Art in Odd Spaces festival turned all of 14th Street into an impromptu art gallery and performance space. Watch the audio slideshow above to hear more about the festival from its founder, Ed Woodham, who started AIOP in Atlanta in 1996 and then brought it to the East Village and Lower East Side as “a response to the dwindling of public space and personal civil liberties,” according to the website.
Additional photography by Heather Holland, Sasha Sumner, and Art in Odd Places.
In an Alphabet City apartment, Antonio Garcia, better known as Chico, showed off his latest works, gesturing with fingers stained black from spray paint and Sharpie markers. The four canvases – each three square feet – depict the corner of Eighth Street and Avenue C from the 1970s to today, with bright hues and cartoon-style figures.
“I like doing buildings, cars, city scenes – not too much of people,” explained Mr. Garcia.
The series was delivered to Speakeasy, a bar on Avenue C, last night. Along with illustrations for Bulldog Gin and a forthcoming mural at the New Amici Pizza restaurant, they are among the artist’s latest (and for now, his last) New York-based creations.
Mr. Garcia has spent nearly 50 years living in the East Village, and more than 30 beautifying buildings, awnings, and walls with his colorful murals. His most recent creation, adorning Ray’s Candy Store, nods to the loss of blogger Bob Arihood. Now Mr. Garcia, 48, plans to leave the neighborhood himself. He said he would depart for Tampa, Florida on Oct. 28. Though he has left town for stretches of time before, this time the absence is indefinite.
“I don’t think I’m going to come back,” he said, “but you can never say never.” Read more…
Luckily for East Villagers, James Wolcott’s memoir of his days as a young culture critic in a now nearly vanished city, “Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York,” places much of its meat and potatoes (along with plenty of gravy) right here in our very own backyard. Steering a middle course between the sometimes overly concentrated, every-word-counts prose of his Vanity Fair columns, and the more loosey-goosey style he deploys in his blog at the same publication, Mr. Wolcott reconfirms his position as New York’s wittiest critic.
Despite its pleasing portability (the book, out later this month, comes in at about 270 pages), “Lucking Out” covers plenty of ground, bopping from Mr. Wolcott’s mice-ridden “man-cave” on East 12th Street, down to CBGB, and back up to the Village Voice, where he made his name. It slides west for a gawk at the gay heyday of the West Village, then uptown for some quality time among the balletomanes of Lincoln Center (with a pause for skuzzy “Taxi Driver”-era Times Square porn along the way), and includes countless screening room séances with his mentor and muse, the late New Yorker film critic, Pauline Kael, to whom large portions of the book can be seen as an extended and touching valentine. Read more…
Ian DuncanThe entrance to the theater at 94 St. Marks Place.
One of the neighborhood’s bastions of avant garde theater has been pulled back from the brink and will remain open for at least the next seven years.
Under St. Marks, the basement theater that hosts offbeat productions like “Naked Girls Reading,” “Basterdpiece Theatre,” “God Tastes Like Chicken” and “Thank You Robot,” has signed a new lease — allaying fears that the venue would be given the boot after its landlord put the five-story building on the market for $5.75 million.
“We are so happy and relieved to have come to this agreement,” said Heidi Grumelot, the artistic director for Horse Trade Theater Group, which operates the theater. “We doubt that any other basement in this city enjoys as much continual creative activity as Under St. Marks.” Read more…
An exhibition opening today at the artistic haven Gathering of the Tribes is inspired in part by the blindness of its charismatic founder, Steve Cannon. “Blind Light” features photography that attempts to toy with the senses, according to a listing on NY Art Beat. “When one sense is diminished, the others are heightened, creating unique perceptive experiences from the remaining information,” the listing reads. The last time The Local chatted with Mr. Cannon, Gathering of the Tribes was still in limbo after his landlord put the East Third Street building on the market for nearly $3 million.
Suzanne RozdebaJames De La Vega puffs on a cigar outside the former home of his East Village Museum.
James De La Vega, who shut down his East Village museum in August of last year and left followers wondering where he’ll end up next, has taken his brand online.
“De La Vega is now writing on the sidewalks of cyberspace,” said the artist, famous for his street art, often adorned with the catch phrase, “Realiza Tu Sueno / Become Your Dream.” In January, Mr. De La Vega said he was working on a “digital experience.” Now, that experience has been revealed: an online store, featuring De La Vega T-shirts, tote bags and even an organic baby body suit with his signature fish jumping out of a bowl. An assortment of coffee mugs, shot glasses and water bottles range from $10-$18.
Mr. De La Vega remained confident that his followers — who see him as an artistic prophet of sorts — would follow him in his new, commercial direction. Read more…
The dressing of the Cube wasn’t the only conspicuous thing that happened at Astor Place over the weekend. Yesterday, around 40 musicians rocking strings, drums, bagpipes, and even a harp convened for what an organizer said was a photo shoot for The New York Times Magazine. As you can see from our video, passersby really dug it.
Around 5 a.m. today, Agata Olek, the artist and “yarn bomber” behind this little number and others, pulled off what may be her masterpiece by wrapping the Astor Place cube. She told Runnin’ Scared the piece is her response to Wall Street, and its name is “I’m still proud to say what i do for a living.”
The Local was a journalistic collaboration designed to reflect the richness of the East Village, report on its issues and concerns, give voice to its people and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves. It was operated by the students and faculty of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, in collaboration with The New York Times, which provides supervision to ensure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards. Read more »
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