I ended up at the beach today – how unoriginal. Yet those two guys did their best to make it something of a different moment. Guy Number One, on fold-up stool, takes photos of the seagulls. Guy Number Two (has to be Two, as he is obviously the faithful assistant) bribes the seagulls. And sunbathers predictably bitch.
The talented, the painfully earnest, the weird… and the really, really boring: they’re all out at the Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, a 3-day free event at the Theater for The New City.
The sampler nature of the program makes it exceptionally interesting and maddening at the same time. It includes local legends (think Penny Arcade, Taylor Mead, Steve Ben Israel…) and new talent,a mix of pleasant discoveries and moments of sheer disbelief at the corny or pedantic nature of the work presented.
The line-up don’t seem to follow any logic – as for example in the “cabaret”, on opening night, the excellent performance of Poez (original spoken word) was followed by the general anaesthesia of the excerpt of “Dr. Noguchi”, itself followed by an unexpectedly nice duo of voices called “Kitsch” (when was the last time something announced as “work coming from an organic place that is sure to captivate the audience” actually did that?). And there are the crowd-pleasers, in the major venue space, on their way to become regulars at this Festival – the Japanese dancers of 10Tecomai are certainly amongst those- , as well as the veterans of the local scene – Joe Bendik, for one… Just a few photos to capture the mood…
I just can’t resist fireworks (and, yes, I love red); this was the skyline tonight.
This was my paparazette moment, as I stepped out for a few quick errands before the non-suspense of the West-Virginia primary tonight.
Woody Allen is directing again in Manhattan, with Larry David of Seinfeld and Curb your enthusiasm fame. The crew was in front of Mogador, the French-Mediterranean cafe with reliable cheap food, and reliably unpredictable service.
The security was busily checking another table around the corner:
It looks like it holds together again all odds, and the city thinks it can’t hold much longer. The Tower of Toys will be demolished, “the symbol of a bygone era”, writes The New York Times.
Yes, maybe it is for some, and yes, its creator Eddie Boros, who started it in 1985, died a year ago, but to a lot of us, beyond the fond memories of sunny afternoons in its shadow, his Tower is the symbol of what makes this neighborhood special: a place where people are still engaged in the life of their community, enjoy a good controversy (and the Tower certainly was, from its very beginning at the 6th Street Garden), but mostly a neighborhood where idiosyncrasies are not only tolerated, but appreciated.
The sculpture on Avenue B and 6th Street became a landmark for legions of TV viewers, an image of the fictional 15th Precinct on the credits for NYPD Blue. By the time the show was off the air, in 2005, the area had already undergone a major gentrification, now accelerated with the endless sprouting of luxury towers, erasing more and more of the urban spaces where a little freedom had grown – wild and mild.
So I’m not exactly sure where this blog is going. I might as well be clear about this upfront.
I have been blogging in French for eight months now, and I had told myself I would not touch politics. Everyone’s blogging about it; I’ve written about politics for years – so I would stick to great, or bad, or strange ,or exhilarating things I’d see in this country. That’s why that blog is called Americana. Well, it turns out that the greatest/worst/strangest/most exhilarating thing since October has been the election, so I wrote mostly about politics.
This time, I will knowingly let myself go where the blog goes. We will see where it takes us. I hope we’ll like it – me, and whomever you are.
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