Friday, July 30, 2010
Get Low back in NY!
Get Low opens today (7/30)
Another cool Kickstarter project!
In December 2009, a bunch of writers, editors, educators, students, photographers, designers and artists launched a not-for-profit writing center in Birmingham, Ala., called the Desert Island Supply Co.
Inspired by programs such as 826 Valencia and the Austin Bat Cave, DISCO is dedicated to giving area students, ages 6 to 18, more opportunities to strengthen their writing skills, explore their minds, intensify their intellectual habits and shape their own futures.
We offer free writing workshops for students, tutor inside local schools and generally try to help out in whatever way we can to assist teachers and principals who want to instill a love of writing in their students. We're also in the process of building out the world's very best desert island supply store. (source)
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Chicken y Chicken
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
STAGE: The Angel In The Trees
The Angel in the Trees
A new play by Dan O'Brien
Directed by Mark Armstrong
Less than a year after moving to Lowden, a small town below the Mason-Dixon line, native New Yorker Madeline Singer encounters an unexplained phenomenon while walking through the woods. The Angels in the Trees is an evocative one-woman show about ghosts, God, and the American South. (source)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
ART: Lonnie Holley
Lonnie Holley: Assemblages and Drawings.
Holley, a self-taught artist, is a sixty year old native Alabamian whose work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. This is Holley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in New York in sixteen years.
Holley’s unique combinations of found materials and everyday detritus result in mysterious and powerful objects. They reference spirituality, African American art forms and history, nature, and family relationships. Simultaneously, the visual impact of Holley’s work invites comparisons to the work of other contemporary artists, and therefore continues to break down the distinctions often made between self-taught artists and those with an art education background.
Holley’s assemblages can be simple or complex in their composition. Along the Rails combines old wire, iron, wood, colored paper, cardboard, plastic and other materials. Assembled with both delicacy and verve, its title suggests a journey, escape or hardship. Molting Lonnie is composed of three parts: found concrete with a rebar that serves as the vertical support for a piece of molten iron. The top of the concrete base is splashed with red paint, dripping down the sides. The materials and their deft organization evoke a raw and formal beauty, while the title of the work suggests impending growth, a recurring theme in Holley’s art.
Featured prominently in Holley’s work is a facial profile, found in drawings, wire sculptures and carved sandstone pieces. Small or large, single or in layers, the profiles have open and expressive eyes. In the drawing I in the Teacher’s Chair, profiles face left and right, while one large eye dominates the center. A kneeling figure cradles a child, watched from above. It is a family or community of sorts, observing and caring for one another.
These faces and figures function as characters in an ongoing story. Indeed, Holley’s vivid descriptions of his art stress the interconnectedness of all people and things, both past and present.
Lonnie Holley was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and is the seventh of twenty-seven children. Against significant obstacles he has been a working artist for over thirty years. In Birmingham, he created a unique outdoor installation of his art on the acre of property where he lived, until a forced relocation seventeen years later. Holley lives and works in Harpersville, Alabama.
Holley’s work is included in numerous public collections: American Folk Art Museum, New York; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Milwaukee Museum of Art, Wisconsin; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.
(source)
Monday, July 19, 2010
Hotter Than July
Hot damn hoe here we go again! NYC's got hot chicken y'all:
From Time Out NY:
Nashville hot chicken
Fiery, cayenne-laced fried chicken—usually served with pickles over white bread—is eaten throughout Music City, but its spiritual home is Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. Lore traces the recipe to current owner Andre Jeffries’s great-uncle Thornton Prince. When a spurned lover fed him extra-spicy chicken out of vengeance, he liked it so much that he began cooking it at his restaurant.
Eat it here: Restaurateur Craig Samuel serves a super-crispy version ($12) at Peaches HotHouse (415 Tompkins Ave at Hancock St, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; 718-483-9111). In addition to seasoning the free-range poultry with garlic, onion powder and cayenne, Samuel uses a secret spice mix that he says contains the “two hottest peppers in the world.”
Friday, July 16, 2010
Beach Schmeach!
Thursday, July 15, 2010
STAGE: Six by Tenn
The 6 shorts include The Municipal Abattoir, Mr. Paradise, Hello From Bertha, The Fat Man’s Wife, The Pink Bedroom, and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen...
Until recently four of these plays (The Municipal Abattoir, Mr. Paradise, The Fat Man’s Wife, and The Pink Bedroom), were never-before-published. Written decades ago, only within the past 10 years have they made their debut in production.
Around 1950 Tennessee Williams wrote to Elia Kazan, “I don’t write with the effervescence that I used to. It comes harder. The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays, some of which are like fire-crackers in a rope. Some of that came from sexual repression and loneliness which don’t exist anymore for very good reasons, and some of it came from plain youth and freshness.”
Where:
The Red Room
85 East 4th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenue (Bowery)
Third Floor, No Wheelchair Access
Tickets: $20
(source)
LookBetween
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
CONGRATS!!
Community Art Makers
David Umlas, Marrilee Ratcliffe - Austin, TX
BRAF's infrastructure investment will allow the Community Art Makers to build upon current resources and offer more structured, resources and work space for artists. Their upcoming projects are focused on artist empowerment and community building. Some of these projects for 2010 include partnerships with the City of Austin Library, Parks and Art in Public Places Departments, 'Art Outside' and 'First Night' pieces that showcase interactivity to a public audience and hands on classes and training for trained and aspiring artists.
The Music Box
The New Orleans Airlift, featuring Swoon - New Orleans, LA
The Music Box will be an interactive environment built from the remains of an 18th century derelict cottage in New Orleans. This imaginatively reconstructed, and ultimately livable “house”, will become a musical instrument to be played by visitors. Instrumentation will range from the rudimentary banging of wooden boards to more elaborate sounds mechanically triggered by opening doors or pulling levers. In addition to visitors, a range of local and national musicians, including a regional high school marching band, will be invited to play the house for the project’s Block Party series, which will be free and open to all.
The installation will visually resemble works Swoon is best known for – a series of intricate handmade boats that have floated the Mississippi, the Hudson river and most recently the Adriatic Sea and the canals of Venice, Italy during the 2009 Biennale. As with these floating crafts, the focus for The Music Box is on found materials, artistic and community collaboration, functional environments and interaction that involves sound and performance.
The New Orleans Airlift is a multi-disciplinary arts organization that produces and facilitates innovative artistic opportunities for New Orleans-based artists locally and around the globe. Bringing influential artists like Swoon from abroad to participate in cutting edge collaborations with local artists at home in our own community increases exposure, amplifies resources and aids the creative development of our city’s unique and irreplaceable creative community that still struggles for sustainability in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The Music Box is the first incarnation of what will become a permanent performance, exhibition and residency space for he New Orleans Airlift.
Reclaimed Art: Community Art from Recycled Materials
The Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, working with students from the University of Mississippi Student Art Association and volunteers from the community, will host a series of community art days. The purpose of the community art days is to reclaim materials from a 1928 building, transform them into works of art, and utilize the work of art to create a focal point around the building the materials where removed which is be renovated into a community arts center.
“We are excited that we have been able to reach several community goals with this project”, shared Wayne Andrews, Director of the Arts Council. “ The project will provide a demonstration of how art can impact a community both by providing beauty and economic development. The art, artists and volunteers will transform an industrial building into a community center with the “undesirable & unwanted” elements repurposed into a piece of community art.”
SCREEN: Honkytonk Man tonight (7/14)
In the middle of the Depression, alcoholic country singer Red Stovall (Clint Eastwood) moves in with his sister's family on their western farm. Red's young nephew, Whit (played by Clint's son, Kyle Eastwood), becomes his dissolute uncle's protector, accompanying him to Nashville for a Grand Ole Opry audition. Joining the duo on their trouble-fraught journey are Whit's grandpa (John McIntire) and another aspiring singer, Marlene (Alexa Kenin). (source)
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
YUM!!!
Pecans! is a business started by PieLab* in Greensboro, AL in conjunction with the YouthBuild* program. It was made possible by the Design Ignites Change Grant given by Worldstudio and Adobe Youth Voices. Its goal is to teach local youth to create a profitable business using a plentiful local resource, pecans. Designers at PieLab have helped the students acquire the skills they need to formulate a business plan, develop their pecan products, brand and market their products, and successfully sell them to delighted customers in Hale County and around the country. (source)
Proceeds go to the YouthBuild Scholarship Fund.
*PieLab is a pie shop and community space that was started by a group of graphic designers in conjunction with HERO, Hale Empowerment Revitalization Organization.
*YouthBuild is a national program for high school drop outs that helps them earn their GED and learn job skills while serving their communities.
Monday, July 12, 2010
SONG: The Blind Boys of Alabama 7/12, 14, 16 @ Lincoln Center
Head here for more info on what each night has to offer.
BOOK: Mary Karr @ 192 Books tonight (7/12)
From 192: Please join us in celebrating the paperback release of Lit, named one of the “10 Best Books of 2009” by The New York Times. In Lit, the long-awaited sequel to he bestselling memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry, Mary Karr chronicles her descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness, and her astonishing resurrection. A recollection of her struggle to come to terms with her Christian faith after years as an agnostic that explores the relationship between spirituality and substance abuse and depression, Lit is also about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; and learning to write by learning to live.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Memphis Beat
Thursday, July 8, 2010
SONG: Steve Earl & Allison Moorer - City Winery residency
(source)
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
ART: Hipsters, Hustlers and Handball Players
Leon Levinstein (American, 1910–1988), an unheralded master of street photography, is best known for his candid and unsentimental black-and-white figure studies made in New York City neighborhoods from Times Square and the Lower East Side to Coney Island. This exhibition, drawn exclusively from the Metropolitan's collection, will feature some forty photographs that reflect the artist's fearless approach to the medium. Levinstein's graphic virtuosity—seen in raw, expressive gestures and seemingly monumental bodies—is balanced by his unusual compassion for his offbeat subjects from the demimonde.
Born in West Virginia in 1910, Levinstein moved to New York in 1946 and spent the next thirty-five years obsessively photographing strangers on the streets of his adopted home. (source) <---click there to read more
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
SWING: New Orleans Moonshiners NYC Debut!
Dance Lesson at 6:30, Live Music at 7:30
“They are the type of group that takes away any worry about the future of traditional jazz in the city that created it.” — AllAboutJazz.com
The jaunty swing of N'awlins has become so iconic that even those who've never visited the Crescent City can get wistful about what it has to offer. Fittingly, the New Orleans Moonshiners are a septet you won't soon forget once you've danced to their bouncy, reverent music. It's the sound and spirit of Louis Armstrong shot through with the subtlest contemporary harmonies, just one reason that the Moonshiners are poised to develop a national following with their first show beyond their Louisiana home base.
Traditional Jazz, Swing
Lesson: Paolo Pasta Lanna teaches Lindy Hop and Charleston
DJ: Tomo Tanaka
Damrosch Park
62nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam
Friday, July 2, 2010
Happy 4th of July!
From Alabama Chanin: DIYAmerican Flag Quilt Kit - Make your own Flag Quilt from 2 layers of 100% Organic Cotton. Follow technique instructions from the Alabama Stitch Book and Alabama Studio Style. Kit comes cut, painted and ready to sew with all materials. Finished size: 103" X 62"
Thursday, July 1, 2010
STAGE: Another Part of the Forest
ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST
The first New York City revival in decades!
The shocking, rarely-seen “prequel” to The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest depicts the early days of the notorious Hubbard family. There’s the father, Marcus, the most-hated man in town; his emotionally crippled wife, Lavinia, who has secrets of her own; their wayward daughter, Regina, and two resentful sons. The eldest son, Benjamin, uncovers a long-buried secret. Threatening to reveal it, he attempts to blackmail his father into signing over the family fortune or face an angry lynch mob. (source)