Obama in Brooklyn...Right Now!

Barack Obama has popped up in the form of street art in Brooklyn, and AAVR Magazine points out the Grattan Street mural near the Morgan L stop. That's part of his More Perfect Union speech in the background, and yes, it looks a little bit more like Fred Armisen's Fauxbama than the real thing.

Less detailed Obama murals can be found on Carlton Avenue at Dean Street in Prospect Heights (photos here and here). How long before Clinton demands Obama apologize for promoting vandalism of public property?

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Frozen New York

Sightseeing Cruises To Offer Up-Close Look To Waterfalls Exhibit

There will be plenty of places to view this summer's waterfalls from the shoreline, but one of the best ways to see the exhibit up close is from a sightseeing boat in New York Harbor. NY1's Valarie D'Elia filed the following Travel With Val report.

When the New York City Waterfalls public art exhibit opens this summer, a couple of the city's sightseeing cruise lines will be offering sailings to give visitors an up-close look.

Circle Line Downtown, in association with the Public Art fund, will float past the waterfalls for a personalized view of the liquid art installation. Fourteen daily 30-minute cruises aboard both the Patriot and Zephyr, which depart from the South Street Seaport, will be dedicated solely to viewing the spectacle, featuring a recorded narration by the artist, Olafur Eliasson. In addition to featuring other sights along the Harbor, Circle Line's regular one-hour Zephyr Seaport Liberty Cruise will also offer views of the waterfall, as will the 30-minute Shark speedboat ride. For Circle Line rates and schedules, go to www.circlelinedowntown.com .

New York Water Taxi is offering as many as eight one-hour cruises with daily departures from South Street Seaport. It is also offering a two-night hotel package from $275.00 per person. For New York Water Taxi, its www.nywatertaxi.com, and for hotel packages, its www.nyctrip.com.


The four waterfalls will be spouting off by mid-July in four locations on the lower harbor, from 7a.m. to 10 p.m., and will be lit up after dark. The $15 million project will be funded by private donors. The city estimates it could bring in more than $50 million in tourism revenues. For more information on The New York City Waterfalls, go to www.nycwaterfalls.org.

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Art Gallery To Open At Former CBGBs

Later this week, the legendary punk music venue CBGB will be rocking a different kind of art form.

A portion of the Bowery space will open Thursday as the Morrison Hotel Gallery, featuring art that symbolizes the place where punk rock music became a part of American culture.

The gallery has promised to respect the history, neighborhood, and generation that became defined at the location, which closed in 2006.

One of the artists whose work will be displayed says the art reflects the simplicity that embodied the legendary club.

"It was a lot easier than it is now," said photographer Steve Joester. "The access to acts then, it was just an easier feel. There wasn't the division, not a lot of the public relations people, and they really didn't realize the kind of value of the image that they do now. A photograph is worth a lot of money to people, back then it was just, you know, like get the shots done and have fun."

Some aspects of the original club remains untouched, including the logo out front, and the bathrooms, which remain the same. Some hidden walls from 1983 just discovered by renovators will also be on view.

The other part of CBGBs will be turned into men's clothing store John Varvatos.

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Ruby Tuesday to Open in Times Square

MY NEW YORK: FAT JOE

"What people don't really, really, really realize is how much this city is better than any other city in the world. I've traveled the world and could tell you this is a fact!"

Fat Joe is a born and bred Bronxite who still speaks in the singular city accent: "When I get to South Africa, they tell me, 'Yo, South Africa is beautiful, it's like a little New Yawk.' And, when I get to Chicago, they tell me 'Yo, this city is incredible, it's like a little New Yawk.' But New Yawk is New Yawk. You feel me?" The rapper born Joseph Antonio Cartagena proves his love of the city by immortalizing its streets and vibe in rap songs. His new album, "The Elephant in the Room," which he says is like a "coming home," hit stores this month. This is his New Yawk.

1 El Bohio Lechonera, 791 E. Tremont Ave., at Mape Street, The Bronx

"This is my favorite restaurant, and most tourists would never see it. They serve Spanish food. This place specializes in pernil [suckling pig.] There are lines of people waiting to get pork, and I don't even eat pork! I go there for my pulpo [octopus] salad. Whenever I get homesick, I go there, it's classic New Yawk."

2 Dominick's Restaurant, 2335 Arthur Ave., at East 186th Street, The Bronx

"A landmark restaurant. It's old-school Little Italy from The Bronx style. You don't even get to order [there is no menu]. They'll throw the plate on the table. And whatever they serve you is tremendous. I love the chicken and peppers."

3 171st Street at Third Avenue, The Bronx

"My father used to own a bodega, Castro Bodega. It's not there anymore. As a little kid, I grew up in that store since I was 4 to 14, helping out the old man. Across the street, there was this park and they used to play jams. That's how I got to know the music. It's where I fell in love with hip-hop."

4 145th Street and Broadway

"When you're looking for your hip-hop gear, the stores on this block are the place to go. They always have the latest leathers, the Pele leather, hip-hop clothing in general. Fly gear for real."

5 Make My Cake, 2380 Seventh Ave., at 139th Street

"I'm not rocking with the sweets now [he's been on a diet and lost 30 pounds just this month] but I can tell you this is the best bakery. They got that red velvet cake and now they got the red velvet cheesecake. If you wanna fake a diet, go for the sugar-free, fat-free sweet potato pie."

6 Uptown Jiggie Sports (formerly Pegasus Sports), 1982 Third Ave., at 109th Street

"This is the best darn fitted-hat store in the city. If they don't have it, it hasn't been made. They're ahead of the trends. I've never walked in there trying to match something and not found it."

7 J Sisters, 35 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues

"I get a real manly manicure and pedicure. No nail polish, just cleaned up and good to go. The Brazilian chicks, those are my girls."

8 Jacob & Co., 48 E. 57th St., between Park and Madison avenues

"Of course we know Jacob is the premier jeweler in the world. If you want quality diamonds, the flyest and the latest in the jewelry department, he is the best. I just got a new red and white Jacob watch - the bezel is huge. I needed a watch to match a chain I got. When you get spoiled enough, you match jewelry. It's a problem, man - this is getting out of hand."

9 Sofrito, 400 E. 57th St., at First Avenue

"If you want a little more upscale Spanish food, go to Sofrito [where the poster at right is from]. They got that sexy flavor - uptown meets downtown. The food is terrific, the customer service is the best. The owner, Jimmy Rodriguez, makes everyone feel like a CEO. He keeps the place proper. The beef sanchoco [beef stew] . . . OMG, it's just the best! The mojitos are good, too!"

10 Burkina Entertainment, 177 E. Houston St., between Allen and Orchard streets

"It's a music store owned by some African brothers. They got some hot s - - t. Stays open 24 hours a day!"

11 Katz's Deli, 205 Houston St., at Ludlow Street

"I love delis and now am able to afford Katz's Deli. You can't be in a recession going to Katz's Deli. I love the pastrami sandwich, but lately I just get the turkey on wheat. They ain't supposed to serve you wheat, but some of the guys slip it in for me."

12 Flight Club, 120 Nassau St., between Beekman and Ann streets

"I'm a sneaker fanatic, damn near addict. Sneakers are my high, my drugs. I got two bedrooms full of sneakers. You could never have enough. My house is almost like a Footlocker, my wife wants to throw me out. I told Michael Jordan I got Jordans that he ain't got! For real. I collect the rarest and the most exclusive, and one thing I do, I got to be able to wear 'em. This place has the hard-to-find, most exclusive sneakers in New York City."

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The Brooklyn Bunny Cam

Shoolbred's

When five-time Tony-winning costume designer William Ivey Long ("The Producers, "Hairspray," "Young Frankenstein," etc.) decided to partner with Robert Morgan of Uncle Ming's club in the East Village, the stage was set for an upscale pub serving an audience, er, patronage of well-dressed, smart and surprisingly subtle boozehounds. Thanks to a grueling five-month, $1 million construction process, the Scottish-themed bar named for Long's grandfather is a highland among Manhattan bars in only its second month of operation. Here's your VIP tour.

For the past 75 years, this space housed the Chinese restaurant Jade Mountain.

The most popular table in the mid-size bar is a six-seater in front of the working fireplace.

Try and spot the Louise Bourgeois works among the otherwise traditional Scotty sketches covering the walls.

Though the décor reflects the designer's Scottish heritage, some of the abundant antiques come from his hometown in South Carolina.

In the back of the room behind a curtain of beads is the very private "Opium Den," which seats eight.

From a ceiling that was once the floor of a Massachusetts Inn, to woodwork framing the bar and windows that were stripped from a disused 1880s church, all the building materials are salvaged.

The kitchen's open daily from 4 p.m. to midnight, serving $6 bangers in a blanket, chips and vinegar, and "bacon & eggs" (smoked paprika deviled eggs with candied bacon).

There are 10 beers on tap, including Shoolbred's Ale ($5 a pint), which is brewed in Massachusetts specifically for this bar.

Thirty types of scotch are sold here, ranging from $10 to $16. The bar frequently hosts scotch-tasting events.

Shoolbred's
197 Second Ave.
(212) 529-0340

[Click to enlarge illustration]

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Katz Deli

Katz's Delicatessen is the best delicatessen in New York. To be the best in the city known for delicatessen is to be the best in the country.

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Nice Tower! Who’s Your Architect?

THE HL23 tower, planned for a site on 23rd Street in Chelsea, is the kind of commission Neil Denari has being waiting for his entire working life. Mr. Denari, a Los Angeles architect who once ran the Southern California Institute of Architecture, has labored on the profession’s periphery for decades. But because of a recent demand for name-brand residential architecture in New York, he is finally getting a chance to test his ideas in the real world.

And Mr. Denari is not alone here. His building is part of an eruption of luxury residential towers already constructed or being designed by the profession’s most celebrated luminaries. In the last five years more than a dozen have been completed; maybe a dozen more are scheduled to break ground this year. They range from soaring, elaborately decorated towers by international celebrities like Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry to smaller but equally ambitious architectural statements by lesser-known talents like Mr. Denari.

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What Will Be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn?

NYTIMES.COM: The growing possibility that much of the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn will be scrapped because of a lack of financing may be a bitter pill for its developer, Forest City Ratner. But it’s also a painful setback for urban planning in New York.

Designed by Frank Gehry, the project was a rare instance in which the architectural talent lined up for a New York project matched the financial muscle behind it. When it was unveiled in late 2003, it seemed to signal a genuine effort to raise the quality of large-scale development in a city still stinging from the planning failures at ground zero.

So if the decision to proceed with an 18,000-seat basketball arena but to defer or eliminate the four surrounding towers is defensible from a business perspective, it also feels like a betrayal of the public trust.

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NEW YORK PHOTO FESTIVAL 2008

Photography, one of the most important visual media of our lives, has been surprisingly uncelebrated, particularly in the United States. New York City, home to the most influential commercial and fine art photography community, has lacked—until now—a large-scale event dedicated to photography.

PowerHouse Books and VII Photo Agency have joined forces to launch the new, annual New York Photo Festival, the first international-level festival of photography to be based in the U.S.

The inaugural New York Photo Festival (May 14–May 18, 2008) promises to deliver a dynamic, high-quality event in what is arguably the photographic capital of the world. The festival will celebrate both contemporary photography and the creative, inspirational talents of the people who produce this work.

The New York Photo Festival will be headquartered in DUMBO, an off-the-beaten-track, but easily accessible neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

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Open Studio, Afternoon with Artists @ Whitney

Open Studio, Afternoon with Artists
Wednesday, March 19 at 2pm
Whitney Museum

About the Artist

Mika Tajima: Born 1975 in Los Angeles, California; lives in New York, New York. Howie Chen: Born 1976 in Cincinnati, Ohio; lives in New York, New York

New Humans, a collaborative founded by Mika Tajima with Howie Chen, explores the intersecting strata of sound, installation, and performance within the context of Tajima’s visual art practice. The elements making up Tajima’s projects slip from foreground sculptures to background props, staging markers, and functional structures, their status in continual transition and production. Challenging the audience’s expectations of sculpture as a static presence, Tajima combines multimedia installations with serial performance elements by New Humans including sonically spare noise music grounded in Minimal composition and evoking a post– John Cage mayhem. A constantly changing roster of collaborators from different disciplines contributes to a relentless layering of visual and aural textures, creating a discordant dialogue.

Appropriately, the web of collaboration is itself frequently the subject and object of New Humans’ cacophonous sonic, optical, and material mash-ups. The two New Humans performances that punctuated Disassociate (2007), an installation by Tajima at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, were created in collaboration with poet-artist-architect Vito Acconci and violinist C. Spencer Yeh. This multilayered work responds structurally to Sympathy for the Devil (1968), Jean-Luc Godard’s closeup film documenting the Rolling Stones’ fractious, collaborative open studio sessions recorded just prior to the moment when the band’s first leader, Brian Jones, went absent from the group (and drowned shortly thereafter). Using the film as a reference point, Tajima notes, the installation and performances reflected the process of working together, with all of its contradictions, takes, trials, errors, and transparency of production.

The installation of sound-baffled modular cubicles in which New Humans performed—instruments included drums, bass, violin, and Acconci’s visceral, poetic voicing—was constructed as what Tajima calls essentially “double-sided paintings on wheels.” These screenprinted and roller-painted works, depicting diagrams for various modular structures (geometric manuals for stacking chairs and fractured schemata for building champagne glass towers), doubled as bulletin boards papered with related graphic work by Tajima and three invited artists joining the collaborative mix.

Giving visual and aural structure to the serial elements of their collaborative creation, New Humans’ time-based performances culminate, like Godard’s film, in a structure of dissolution: in the collaboration with Yeh, Tajima hurls a stack of 1960s-era Eames chairs into a tower of glass champagne flutes, simultaneously creating an instrument and sound from the obliteration as the glass smashes to the floor. It is this problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project. TODD ALDEN

Mika Tajima / New Humans, Disassociate, 2007. Performance with Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, February 24, 2007

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New Landmarks Include Webster Hall

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission today designated five new city landmarks — four of them in the East Village — and created a new historic district, Fiske Terrace-Midwood Park, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Descriptions of the five new landmarks and the new historic district follow. The commission held a hearing last October on the four East Village sites, which were identified as worthy of preservation in a 2006 commission study of the East Village’s historical heritage.

Webster Hall and Annex, 119-125 East 11th Street

Webster Hall, a 19th-century East Village assembly space where F. Scott Fitzgerald once reveled and Emma Goldman urged social change, was designed by Charles Rentz and built in 1886, with an annex added in 1992. The Renaissance Revival structure is clad in red Philadelphia pressed brick with brownstone trim and red terra cotta ornamentation. (A mansard roof was destroyed in the 1930s.) The hall became famous for masquerade balls after a 1913 fund-raiser for the socialist magazine The Masses and became a hub not only for Village bohemians but also for gay men and lesbians. The artists Charles Demuth, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald used the hall, as did political and labor leaders like Goldman, Samuel Gompers, Margaret Sanger and Dorothy Day. The Progressive Labor Party was established there in 1887, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914. In the 1950s and ’60s, RCA Victor operated a audio recording studio, where performers included Arthur Rubinstein, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Julie Andrews, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles and Marian Anderson. Webster Hall was a rock club in the 1980s. The structure is currently used as a nightclub and concert hall.

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Jeppe Hein @ 303 Gallery

Jeppe Hein

303 GALLERY
525 West 22nd Street
March 1–April 12


In a corner of Jeppe Hein’s first solo show at 303, a hole a few inches off the floor spews a screw each time someone triggers a nearby sensor. Elsewhere, a white plastic cube less than one inch high spins on a tiny turntable; strobe lighting makes it look like three white cubes. Hanging above the gallery attendant’s desk, a piece titled Almost Nothing, 2008, consists of a foot-wide sphere of glass that contains a feather bobbing in the currents of a little fan. Clearly, modesty is a central conceit of this work. What, Hein seems to ask, is the minimum it takes to hold a viewer’s interest in an age when a Richard Tuttle piece of wire already does the job so well? The answer, of course, is almost nothing: Hein’s works, for all the small scale of their effects, are surprisingly engrossing.

Technology has something to do with it. We’re so acutely attuned to the power of machines that even when they’re used to achieve so very little—especially when they’re used that way—it’s hard to pull away. The tick of Hein’s falling screws recalls the millions of mouse clicks we’ve heard; his Multiplied Cube, 2008, is all of industrial society’s wasted energy and effort, writ small. Other similar works—Tom Friedman’s tiny speck of his own shit comes to mind—rely on a compressed absurdity to do their job. Their modest means are meant to be at odds with their emotional ambition. Tuttle-like, Hein’s modesty is modest through and through.

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