Here’s one to add to your coffee-mugs-for-a-cause collection: on the heels of the Living Theatre’s successful campaign, online fundraising site Lucky Ant has announced that it’s expanding into the East Village and teaming with FAB Cafe. The coffee shop, an arm of Fourth Arts Block, is attempting to draw $6,000 to replace its floor. Depending on how much you donate here, you can score anything from a FAB Cafe coffee mug to a private barista class.

Just hours before its deadline, the Living Theatre tweets that it has met its goal of raising $24,000 for rent arrears. Congrats to the Clinton Street mainstay. And speaking of Twitter, The Local’s Stephen Rex Brown is tweeting from Community Board 3’s SLA committee meeting right now.

It’s a fitting time for the revival of a thirteenth-century play with corruption in Chinese bureaucracy at its heart: Last month, Chinese official Bo Xilai was suspended from the Politburo, the twenty-five member committee that rules China by fiat, following allegations that he wiretapped President Hu Jintao. Meanwhile, Mr. Xilai’s wife stands accused of murdering a British business consultant.

It’s also about time that China’s growing influence on the world and cultural stages be reflected in a more well-rounded way than it was in “Chinglish” – the comedy about a Cleveland sign-painting company looking to expand to China whose characters were “about as personally involving as the brightly colored, illustrative figures in a PowerPoint presentation,” according to the Times review.

Unfortunately, the Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America’s production of “The Chalk Circle,” now at Theater for the New City, doesn’t even rise to the level of “Chinglish.” Read more…

Daniel Maurer

Organic Modernism cleared out its store on Avenue A last month and announced it was closed, but now it’s stocked and selling again. Today, Inanc Uyar, a manager at the Williamsburg-based mini chain, told The Local that the store would be open for just another two weeks before calling it quits once and for all. In the meantime, furniture is 10 to 15 percent off.

OM’s initial closing followed the shuttering of three vintage furniture stores in NoHo, but for at least four days this month there will be no shortage of designers selling their wares in that neighborhood. The third annual NoHo Design District will feature over 100 local and international designers promoting their experimental art, furniture prototypes, “glass stalactites dripping off candelabras” and more beginning on May 18, according to a press release. Read more…

Photos: Tim Schreier

That Adam Yauch painting wasn’t the only public art to hit the streets yesterday. Cake, a street and studio artist who boasts degrees from Pratt and Parsons and has been featured in the Barney’s windows as well as on countless walls around town, has added three of her signature portraits to the back wall of La MaMa E.T.C.’s building.

The work on Third Street between Bowery and Second Avenue was a collaboration between FABnyc‘s ArtUp program and Murals Around New York, which previously collaborated with FABnyc on those Fourth Street construction-container canvases, among other projects.

Stephen Robinson Danielle Mastrion with her art.

Stephen Robinson Fumero with his work-in-progress.

Less than a week after the death of Adam Yauch, a mural of him and his fellow Beastie Boys appeared on East First Street yesterday, part of “phase 3” of the Centre-fuge Public Art Project.

The painting by Brooklyn native Danielle Mastrion joined new works by five other artists – Fumero, Michael DeNicola, Jade Fusco, CRAM Concepts and Bishop 203 – on a metal construction trailer between First and Second Avenues. Since the street-art initiative was launched in January, the modular unit has served as a canvas for a new batch of artists every other month.

One of them, Fumero, recently painted a mural on the walls of The Strand. See another photo.

Courtesy of Hot Sugar

Plenty of great music has come out of the East Village, but on an album due out May 14, the East Village is going into the music. On “Moon Money,” Nick Koenig, who records under the name Hot Sugar, changes the way we hear the neighborhood by manipulating sounds from its streets – an experimental process known as associative music.

“Familiar sounds represent a location or experience, triggering a mood you’ve grown to feel towards that place or experience,” Mr. Koenig explained. “I try to incorporate sounds familiar to New York City inhabitants in my music, hoping to subtly provoke those moods in my audience.” The musician recently broke down one of his tracks for The Local, to show how he puts his listeners in an East Village state of mind. Read more…

Jonathan Slaff Dain Alexandra (l) as the ghost of Molly Picon.
Jennifer Koller (r) as Lily Field.

With the Living Theatre having raised less than half the money it’s seeking in order to stave off eviction, it’s a fitting time for a play about the woes of a theater company.

“155 First Avenue (The Epic Adventures of the Theater for the New Syzygy),” now showing at Theater for the New City, portrays a theater company in New York struggling against financial strains and decades of neighborhood change. Playwright Toby Armour has made the theater itself the main character through his strong and versatile writing, and the actors in the play are facets of the artistic community.

The lifeblood of the theater is a woman named Lily Field, smartly played by Jennifer Koller. The first act presents her reminiscing in the basement of 155 First Avenue. Her guides through the past are ghosts: Molly Picon, Caroline Astor, Walt Whitman, Peter Stuyvesant, and Jake, a Jewish peddler who, starting from the beginning of time itself, recounts the series of “miracles” that led to the theater’s current location. Read more…

Gavin Doyle Zac Posen and Susan Kirshbaum

Tonight at 6 p.m. at the Bowery Poetry Club, Susan Kirschbaum will read from her debut novel, “Who Town.” The book is drawn from Ms. Kirschbaum’s experiences over the past 15 or so years in New York: after moving from a middle-class Philadelphia suburb, she covered the downtown scene for The Times, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post and others. Now in her late 30s, Ms. Kirschbaum is the rare reporter who became part of her stories, dating band members and artists and hanging out with the crowd she was supposed to cover. She told The Local about her downtown-centric writing life, and how Candace Bushnell, the author of “Sex and the City,” started it all.

When you came to New York, what was the Lower East Side and East Village scene like?

I got to New York in the late ’90s, when the Beahver parties were raging at Don Hills and junkies still roamed Alphabet City. A lot of young artists still lived in the East Village and bars like 7A and 2A raged late at night. I also remember going to poetry slams in Tompkins Square Park. Read more…

Francisco Daum Flowers outside of CBGB in 2001, after the death
of Joey Ramone.

Yesterday, The Local posted news, which appeared in The Times today, of the upcoming CBGB music festival. In a follow-up interview, we spoke with the two bookers of the upcoming festival, Louise Parnassa-Staley, who held the same job at the old CBGB, and Diane Gentile, who also handles booking at Bowery Electric.

So what’s the state of the local music scene that CBGBs will be returning to?

Ms. Parnassa-Staley: The music scene is still there. You just go down the block from where CBGB used to be and you have Bowery Electric. A lot of future CBs bands will be playing there. I don’t think since the original CBs closed that the music has stopped.

Ms. Gentile: I’ve been at Bowery Electric for about four years. When I first got there, there was no music on the Bowery because CBs had closed. We started to book bands and it was a little slow-going in the beginning. It just started to build. We had a tremendous response from bands in New York City and Brooklyn who wanted to play. And it built up to the point where we started getting calls from booking agents and bands that were from out of town. Read more…

Godlis A 1977 photo of CBGB, which operated on the Bowery from 1973 to 2006. Owners of the club’s assets are now planning a festival and seeking to revive it at a new site.

For the last six years the name CBGB has been little more than a logo on T-shirts for young people in the East Village. Now a group of investors has bought the assets of that famous punk-rock club, which closed in 2006, and plans to establish an ambitious music festival this summer, with an eye toward reopening the club at a new downtown location.

The new owners of the club’s assets — some with ties to the original Bowery establishment — say they hope that the festival will revive the wide-open artistic aesthetic associated with CBGB, which in its heyday served as an incubator for influential acts like Television, the Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Sonic Youth and Patti Smith. Read more…

Daniel Maurer The mural-in-progress this morning.

Ray LeMoine David Nordine on Saturday.

Last week it was The Bean’s forthcoming location, and this week an Avenue A newcomer makes itself known with a mural. On Saturday, David Nordine, 27, was painting what he said would be “a cameo of a man and woman facing each other” on the wall that Amor y Amargo shares with its forthcoming sister establishment, Gin Palace. (The building at Avenue A and Sixth Street also houses Cienfuegos, a cocktail bar by the same owners.)

Mr. Nordine, who lives on Third Street, has done other work in the neighborhood, including murals on the walls of Mama’s Food Shop and the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union.

Created with Photos: Tim Schreier

A handful of new exhibits opened at the New Museum last week. Click through our slideshow to preview three of them: Phyllida Barlow’s “Siege” (slides 1 through 4; showing through June 24) is the British sculptor’s first New York solo exhibition. “Five Americans” (slides 5 and 6; through July 1) showcases British filmmaker and photographer Tacita Dean’s portraits of dancer Merce Cunningham, art critic Leo Steinberg, and visual artists Julie Mehretu, Claes Oldenburg, and Cy Twombly. And “The Parade” (slides 7 through 13; through Aug. 26 in the Studio 231 space adjacent the museum) pairs the films of Nathalie Djurberg with bird sculptures that the Swedish claymation artist created from wire, clay, and canvas.

Also showing: “Bodies of Society,” an installation by Ms. Djurberg’s compatriot, Klara Linden, and Ellen Altfest’s “Head and Plant,” collecting the New York artist’s recent oil paintings of male anatomy.

David X Prutting/BFAnyc.com The Hole’s dinner for Dior Vernis.

After blurring the line between art and landscaping, The Hole is now bending the boundaries between art and food. Last night, the Bowery gallery held a dinner party that introduced attendees to the medium of “pour painting,” and this summer, The Local has learned, it will open a pop-up “artist cafe,” cheekily dubbed Hole Foods.

The pop-up cafe is in part the vision of The Hole’s founder, Kathy Grayson, who described herself as an arm-chair restaurant critic and food blogger. “I had never seen an artist-designed restaurant, only restaurants with a few sad paintings on the walls,” she told The Local. “I thought that the artists I represent are all interdisciplinary and are capable of doing not just painting and drawing but sculpture, video, design, installation, furniture, you name it.”

On Wednesday, the Meatball Factory temporarily closed on 14th Street and Second Avenue so that Brooklyn-based artist Joe Grillo could install a mural on its walls, ceilings, and floors. Read more…

HiFi Bar and B.A.D. Burger both set up somber shrines to the neighborhood’s past today. The bar at 169 Avenue A just announced on Twitter that the vintage photo booth from the recently-closed Lakeside Lounge now has a new home. And just next door, a tipster tells EV Grieve that a candle is burning in honor of Adam “MCA” Yauch of the Beastie Boys, who died today. Back in 1982 the Beastie Boys recorded “Polly Wog Stew” in the B.A.D. Burger space, which once was a studio.

Last Thursday, Brad Burgess was able to stop city marshals from evicting The Living Theatre after gathering $10,400 for back rent. But in 12 days the theater, known for its avant garde productions admired by the likes of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, faces yet another deadline. If The Living Theatre cannot raise $24,000 by May 14 it will have to move out. Its founder, Judith Malina, will likely face eviction from her apartment above the theater shortly thereafter.

To meet the goal, the theater has set up a call for donations that went live yesterday through a local crowd-funding site, Lucky Ant. The $24,000 would go towards arrears, as well as the money to pay a consultant who would formulate a plan to put the theater back in the black.

“We are down to the wire,” said Mr. Burgess, the 27-year-old actor who is caring for Ms. Malina and helping run the theater. Read more…

Courtesy of Kinofest NYC A still from “The Other Cheslea.”

Maryna Vroda, whose film “Cross Country” won the Palme d’Or for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival last year, will make her stateside debut at the Ukrainian Museum this Thursday. She’s one of four Ukrainian filmmakers – plus one from Berlin and another from Brooklyn – who will kick off this year’s Ukrainian and Post-Soviet Film Fest, dubbed Kinofest NYC.

The festival is sponsored by neighborhood institutions such as the Self Reliance Federal Credit Union and Veselka, which will cater a reception following Thursday’s screening. Andrew Kotliar, its director, said he created it three years ago with the goal of “celebrating creativity, not an ethnicity,” though he also hoped to bring together some divided groups. Read more…

Daniel Maurer Walker Fee at work.

Over the weekend, Walker Fee continued work on the mural he’s painting on the wall of The Bean’s forthcoming location on First Avenue. When it’s done, it’ll be studded with mosaics courtesy of – who else? – Jim Power. But there’s a slight chance the steam-themed mural will evaporate: the landlord is said to have voiced concerns that it doesn’t jibe with a hotel that’s set to open above the storefront.

Mr. Fee – who painted the murals inside of The Bean’s Second Avenue location along with Nicolina and other members of their artists’ collective, the Free Arts Society – is using housepaint to create a java-themed riff on Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” Taking a break from his work on Saturday, he told us, “This building just got painted over, and I’m anxious to see if I can do a cool atmosphere-changing mural to make it seem like the place is being held up by columns of smoke.”

But has his work changed the atmosphere a little too much? Read more…

Paula Litsky Bob Rosenthal at Ginsberg’s funeral.

It’s the last day of National Poetry Month, so here’s the final installment of our interview with Bob Rosenthal, conducted at Allen Ginsberg’s old 12th Street apartment, where Mr. Rosenthal worked as his secretary for nearly two decades. (Parts one, two, and three of this leisurely conversation ran last week.) As Ginsberg grew older and ill, his assistant followed him to a 14th Street loft purchased from the painter Larry Rivers; when Ginsberg died in 1997, Mr. Rosenthal became executor of the poet’s estate and guardian of one of his last meals.

Allen’s Addictions
Allen always had some pot around – he was a pot propagandist and so if a joint was being passed around and someone was going to take a photograph he would grab the joint so he’s got it. But actually, I rarely ever saw him smoke. He had pot for boyfriends – it’s a good line: “Oh, you want to come up and smoke?” It was really for them. He would go to LSD conventions with the big guys – the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library guys, Huxley and all those guys. They would give him acid and he would come home and put it in the refrigerator and that was cute. There was a little vial of LSD and it said “Do not take without permission of Allen or Bob” – so I guess Bob had permission. So that was nice. But I never saw him on LSD. Read more…