Good Peoples Disco Cruise

What’s better than enjoying an all-vinyl disco set with Good Peoples? Enjoying an all-vinyl disco set with Good Peoples while cruising around New York harbor at night.

HuskMitNavn @ LaViolaBank Gallery

Early Music Videos by David Bowie hosted by Thurston Moore

Held in conjunction with MoMA's Looking at Music exhibition, this retrospective of David Bowie's early music videos features classics like "Life on Mars," "Heroes," and "Ashes to Ashes," among others. Thurston Moore, alongside Barbara London, Associate Curator of MoMA's Department of Media, selected each piece from the complete works of Bowie's videos, and the ubiquitous noisemaker provides commentary on the films throughout the evening.

***

Cazals @ Hiro Ballroom

Flowers of Evil in NYC this thursday....

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
STILL BLOOM

CUETO PROJECT

Opening Thursday November 6th, 2008
Reception from 6 to 8 pm


551 West 21st Street
New York NY 10011

***

Two Rooftop Murders, Decades Apart

The murder of a young woman on Sunday who wanted to see a rap star up close and personal revived memories — in some of its grisly details and in its brush with celebrity — of a sensational New York murder less than a mile away but more than a quarter-century ago.

On Sunday night, the authorities said, a bartender’s assistant lured a young woman to the rooftop of a karaoke club in Times Square, attacked her, and killed her.

The 1980 case involved a promising violinist at the Metropolitan Opera, who was taken to the roof of the Metropolitan Opera House, attacked and thrown down an air shaft — nude, bound and gagged — to her death.

In this week’s case, the cultural backdrop was hip-hop. In the 1980 case, the performance was by the Berlin Ballet. The tabloids called it the “Murder at the Met.”

This week’s victim was Ingrid Rivera, a 24-year-old airline employee who attended a birthday party for the rapper Lil’ Kim at Spotlight Live, a club on Broadway at 49th Street, on Sunday night. The 1980 victim was Helen Hagnes, who was 31.

***

Peter Hujar @ Matthew Marks Gallery

Peter Hujar

MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY
523 West 24th Street
March 15–April 26


Interest in this show, which arrives just over twenty years after photographer Peter Hujar’s untimely death from AIDS, could at first glance be chalked up to something like sociological curiosity. Shot between 1969 and 1985, nearly all in the artist’s East Village studio, these thirty-one photographs make up a fascinating study of a highly specific, highly mythologized era in New York City’s cultural history. The exhibit includes intimate portraits of downtown figures such as Hujar’s lover, the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz; the stunning, wistful Cookie Mueller; and an impossibly young, rumple-haired John Zorn—not to mention a suited-up Warhol, who, by this 1975 portrait session, was, admittedly, wholly uptown.

But what a strictly sociohistorical approach might miss is Hujar’s enormous gift for presenting beautifully lit and classically formed compositions that are nonetheless shot through with the decidedly rougher (though no less seductive) texture of the corporeal. The mark of the body serves as the punctum that provides a frisson of lyric realism. This combination of the rough and the smooth is, arguably, a trope that reached its ultimate articulation in the work of Mapplethorpe, but Hujar’s own practice is decidedly more modest, and, as such, more human and appealing than that of his well-known follower. In these portraits, texture can be as light-touched as the downy traces of mustache and the glint of a beaded rope belt on a homeless woman (Girl in My Hallway, 1976) or Mueller’s lustrous locks and faintly pitted skin (Cookie Mueller, 1981). In other cases, the subversion that texture enacts is more overtly political, as in the gender-bending, hirsute resplendence of a bearded Cockette (1973) or the erect member of a male nude (1978). With these disruptions of the conventionally beautiful, Hujar’s work points to the beauty that is inherent in disruption itself.

Photo: Girl in My Hallway, 1976, black-and-white photograph, 14 1/2 x 14 1/2".

***

DESIGNER OPENS BOUTIQUE AT SITE OF LEGENDARY CLUB CBGB

CBGB has cleaned up its act and gotten a new infusion of style - menswear designer John Varvatos launched a shop at the old site of the rock landmark over the weekend.

And punk preservationists will be glad to hear that the Bowery site - which once hosted such pioneers as the Ramones and Blondie - hasn't been sanitized beyond recognition.

PHOTOS: Tour the shop.

The stage is gone, replaced by a tailoring shop, but it's encased with gold Alice Cooper records.

And those who remember the walls encrusted with posters and stickers will be relieved to find them intact and preserved behind glass.

With the designer's head-banger cred - he counts MC5 as his favorite band, writes a music column for British GQ and features Alice Cooper, Velvet Revolver and Cheap Trick in his ad campaigns - Varvatos has made the site equal parts museum and retail space.

"I wanted to combine music, fashion, memorabilia and really make it like a cultural space," he told The Post.

Varvatos is doing just that by featuring his lines of clothing and accessories, and his work for Converse, while also offering for sale items such as vinyl records, new and vintage audio equipment from the '70s, rock-photography books and memorabilia from his personal collection.

Imagine what guitarist Slash's living room might look like, and you'll get the picture.

"I like it. I'm relieved," said Arturo Vega, creative director for the Ramones, who has lived around the corner from the club since 1973.

"We were expecting a drug store in the space," he said. "So when I found out it was Varvatos moving in, it was a relief."

Mutual acquaintances put Vega together with the designer to add memorabilia to his decor.

The space had been empty for a year when Varvatos asked the landlord if he could look at it.

"Within 15 seconds, I thought, 'It's gonna be a bank. I gotta do something here,' " Varvatos recalled.

The designer takes his music seriously. The space has a small, movable stage where he will promote upcoming artists at monthly concerts, and the company is working on partnering with a radio station to broadcast from the store.

"Last week we were working and two kids from Stockholm came by, backpacks still on, just from the airport, and for their first stop, they wanted to see CBGB," he said.

"I want those kids to come here. They don't have to buy anything; that's not the intention. I want them to come in here and feel like, 'Wow, this is really cool. I can still feel it, I can still smell it, I can still get that aura.' "

***