Archive for June, 2007

Things sound so much better in French.  Take for instance Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…), the exhibit Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak curated at Sara Meltzer Gallery.  Doesn’t Ceci n’est pas just seem like something that would roll off your tongue if you knew which letters to pronounce?  So much more sophisticated than simply “This is not.”  But, since some of us sadly are not as multilingual as we’d like to imagine ourselves to be, we get a bonus title in English. 

Art devotees, however, surely would recognize Ceci n’est pas…  as a play on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, which coyly displayed the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe under a picture of a pipe.  By doing so, Magritte reinforced the fact that his painting was just that—a painting, a representation of a pipe, not a tangible pipe.  By borrowing Magritte’s phrase, the exhibit at Sara Meltzer Gallery clearly winks at the in-the-know art world.   

Yet with this biting title, the gallery is simultaneously smirking at the art world, by poking holes through its snobby facade.  They say:   

Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) an exhibition about painting. This is not an exhibition that defines a moment or a trend. This is not an exhibition that celebrates the emerging artist or the mid-career artist or those who have passed. This is not an exhibition about appropriation, subversive strategies or architectural interventions. This is not an exhibition about global warming, the war in Iraq, government corruption, Lindsey Lohan or Knut the polar bear.

This is not even The Bong Show, which also capitalized on Magritte’s The Treachery of Images to reflect on what is and is not acceptable subject matter in art. 

Cleverly, by explaining all that it is not, the exhibit brings us full circle.  We understand the irony of our self-awareness.  We get that an exhibit like this one could potentially be poking fun of us, but because we know that, we think we’ve transcended the game.  In reality, we’re still just another overly smart, dumb consumer. 

This sort posturing in the art world is what Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) is all about.  With acid wit, twenty-two artists explore what art is … and is not.  As players in the field, they’ve seen the hype, the trends, the gimmicks, the frustrations, the elitism, and the personalities that make up the contemporary art world.  Sometimes the artists leave you guessing what’s a stereotype and what’s the truth, but they never leave you indifferent.   

The artists showcasing their talents are Tamy Ben-Tor, Peter Coffin, Jennifer Dalton, Alejandro Diaz, Charley Friedman, Neil Goldberg, Terence Gower, Pablo Helquera, Christopher K. Ho and Troy Richards, Nina Katchadourian, David Kramer, Cary Leibowitz, Michael Lindeman, Pam Lins, Reynard Loki, Edgar Orlaineta, Laura Parnes, Danica Phelps, Jude Tallichet, Guy Richards Smit, and Michael Smith. 

There are also a slew of cheeky events in relation to the exhibit:  

Wednesday, July 11, 7pm
Pablo Helguera performs We all Need a Pygmalian, a musically enhanced inspirational lecture introducing The Pablo-Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style. Thursday, July 19, 8pm
An evening of screenings by Alex Bag, Kate Gilmore, David Kramer, Laura Parnes, Guy Richards Smit and Michael Smith. Tuesday, July 24, 7pm
Kalup Linzy performs a sequel to his 2006 Conversations wit de Churen V: As Da Art World Might Turn. Wednesday, July 25, 6-8pm
Open Book is an opportunity for artists who work in book form to share their production and process with other artists and interested viewers. Please submit materials to Sara Meltzer Gallery by no later than July 6th. Co-sponsored with Regency Arts Press Ltd. For further details, visit www.sarameltzergallery.com. Tuesday, August 14, 4pm
A walk-thru of the exhibition with private dealer Betsey Geffen, aka Charley Friedman

Ceci n’est pas… (This is not…) just opened yesterday and will run through Friday, August 17. Sara Meltzer Gallery (525-531 West 26^th St., NYC) is open Monday - Friday, 11am-6pm; closed for July 4. 

Photo: Jennifer Dalton, The Collector-ibles (Top 10 Collectors According to ArtNEWS) (detail), 2006. 

Happy birthday, S’mac!  The East Village eatery (Sarita’s Macaroni & Cheese, S’mac for short, is located at 345 East 12th Street, New York) that fancies up macaroni and cheese turns one today and is celebrating by offering its All-American nosh for just one dollar. 

For the record, an All-American is your standard mac and cheese—American and cheddar cheese on your choice of twisted elbow macaroni or whole-wheat pasta, with or without breadcrumbs.  The nosh is the smallest size, and usually goes for $4.25.  Skillets hang on the wall to help you figure out portion size, but a nosh is perfect if you plan on trying more than.  After all, why get your plain Jane macaroni and cheese at a place that specializes in more exotic blends?

Offering up a gooey array of macaroni and cheese skillets, S’mac is a turophile’s dream.  Among the cheeses that smother the pasta are American, brie, cheddar, goat cheese, gorgonzola, gruyere, manchego, mozzarella, muenster, parmesan, and pepper jack.  If you’re building your own, you can only choose from All American or 4 Cheese sauce so for a more distinctive cheese, go with one of the main macs or current specials.

You can view the complete menu here, smacnyc.com/what.html but the highlights include:

CHEESEBURGER: For the Hearty Meat Eater! Ground Beef done to perfection with onions, garlic and a hint of ketchup and mustard. Don’t forget the best part - a combination of American and Cheddar cheeses.

…

GRUYERE: A Swiss Mac that keeps you coming back for more. Gruyere coupled with its partner in crime, slab bacon. Hard to resist!

…

GARDEN (LITE): Don’t let the “Lite” fool you - this baby is as satisfying as any of the other MACs! Lite Cheddar, Parmesan, roasted cauliflower and portobello mushrooms, roasted garlic, broccoli and scallions.

They also have three specials:

MARSALA MAC: North American comfort food blended with Indian spices - exotic? mysterious? avant-garde? - you be the judge. This one is certainly not for the faint of heart!

BUFFALO CHICKEN MAC: Cheddar & American cheeses with boneless chicken pieces and buffalo wing sauce. We’ll even top it off with crumbled blue cheese if you’d like!

GINGER WASABI MAC: Goat Cheese blended with soy sauce, ginger, wasabi and scallions … who says East can’t meet West!

Be the first to know about the latest specials at S’mac by signing up for the mailing list: keepmeintheloop@smacnyc.com.

Not too daring, I got the 4 Cheese, made of muenster, American, gorgonzola, and cheddar.  It was good but not the crunchy baked goodness of Chat’n’Chew’s macaroni and cheese.  I also sampled the Marsala Mac, which kicked it up a notch with spicy Indian flavors.  I liked the concept of the Brie Mac, which is sprinkled with bits of roasted fig and shiitake mushrooms, but found brie to be a bit overwhelming for macaroni and cheese.  The Goat Cheese Mac was heavy on the spinach and light on the Kalamata olives, but was still very tasty.

As for atmosphere, it was very IKEA—cute and modern, but verging on rinky-dink.  In classic cafeteria style, you have to clean up for yourself, separating the skillets from the silverware and so forth.

Overall, it’s a fun place to take out-of-towners, who will like the gimmick of a restaurant that servers only one type of food since they’re probably used to only eating at huge chains like Chili’s and Applebees.  It’s also a good casual date.  I saw one couple sharing a large skillet instead of getting their own smaller ones.  Very cute.  If you go with a group of friends, I’d recommend each person getting something different and sharing, though.

Here are two fun bits of trivia to work into conversation when you go to S’mac:

Crayola has an orange-ish crayon called Macaroni and Cheese

Thomas Jefferson is rumored to have invented macaroni and cheese.

In A Mighty Heart, one scene reoccurs several times. Friends and family of Daniel Pearl, the kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter, add to chart full of leads and links to his disappearance. By the end, the whole dry erase board is full of scribbles and arrows. It’s hard to determine what follows what.

The same could be said for the movie, an adaptation of Mariane Pearl’s best-selling book. Mariane (Angelina Jolie) and Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), married and with a kid on the way, were reporters based in Pakistan in the months after the events of September 11, 2001. Daniel left for an interview on January 23, 2002 and never returned, despite the frantic attempts of Pakistani and U.S. law officials and Mariane’s family and friends to track him.

Mariane Pearl has said that she meant the book to serve as a way for her son Adam to know his father, but Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation doesn’t come close to accomplishing her original mission. Instead, he spends a majority of the film on the search for Daniel Pearl. It’s hard to become involved in this subject when—unless you lived under a cave in 2002—you know Daniel Pearl’s fate, and when the same situation could easily befall an international reporter any day now. Does anyone remember what could have happened Jill Carroll?

Allow me to be clear. I’m not saying that movies should gloss over recent history, but in this case A Mighty Heart offers us little edifying information, the way a book like Lawrence Wright’s brilliant The Looming Tower did. And it doesn’t serve as a jarring reminder to honor heroes the way Paul Greengrass’ United 93 did. Again, the notable thing of A Mighty Heart is that we come out of it knowing next to nothing about Daniel Pearl. He was certainly brave, but how? What kind of husband was he? What was he like as a co-worker? Was he scared being a stranger in a hostile land? Any answers to these questions would have given us a new perspective on a tragic world event; instead it feels more like the glossy hooey of World Trade Center.

Jolie isn’t to blame here. She gives a sturdy, credible performance as Mariane Pearl. And she doesn’t look like she’s ready for a Maxim photo shoot, which was one of the many flaws of The Good Shepherd. (No circa 1950 housewives looked like her. Hell, how many housewives in 2007 do?) Through her coping of the day-to-day uncertainty of her husband’s future, coupled with a media blitz, we get some idea of what Daniel Pearl meant to her, even if the movie doesn’t clearly offer that.

RATING: (2 out of 4 stars)

Movie Website:

“Free cash while supplies last!” Jonathan LeVine Gallery coyly advertised for tonight’s reception of Shepard Fairey’s E Pluribus Venom. By 7 PM the line to get in was already snaking long past the 81 Front Street entrance of the DUMBO installation space. Sure enough, the opening was a goldmine for art scensters.

The money was on the walls. With clever turns of phrase, Fairey — co-founder of the aptly named Swindle magazine — reimagined the Almighty Dollar in terms of America’s ruthless capitalism. In two floor-to-ceiling paintings of dollar bills, the artist quipped:

OBEDIENCE IS THE MOST VALUABLE CURRENCY
INDISCRIMINATE CAPITALISM
IN LESSER GODS WE TRUST
CASH CONQUERS ALL

REPETITION WORKS
MANUFACTURING DISSENT SINCE 1989

He even took a stab at money’s hold on the press:

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS GUARANTEED TO THOSE WHO OWN ONE

He continued his tongue-in-cheek critique of money in one of his paintings over muted collages, with the statement, “U.S. TREASURY. BRINGING DREAMS TO LIFE.”

Bundled up with money were themes of obedience (Fairey is famous for his “Obey Giant” street campaign), government, and war, suggesting that many people are blindly nationalistic.

Not suprisingly, red, black, and gold typified Fairey’s palette, although a smattering of paint adorned the floor in a kind of we-don’t-need-a-fancy-gallery-to-show-our-art type of way.

To top off the Dewars-fueled evening, Fairey was DJing his own reception, along with Cosmo Baker (The Rub) and 10 Fingers (700 Club Philly).

The DUMBO exhibit will be on view Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 - 7 PM, from June 22nd to July 7.

A second exhibition will open this Saturday, June 23, at Jonathan LeVine Gallery (529 West 20th St., 9th Fl, Manhattan), and will run through July 21.

You will not die if a penny thrown off the Empire State Building hits you.  Case in point: Anthony Savini.

About ten years ago, Anthony Savini was walking along, minding his own business, when something hit him. He turned around to yell at his assailant, but no one was there. Suddenly, it started raining pennies. He had become a magnet for money. It took him a second to realize he was right under the Empire State Building. Tourists were throwing coins off the skyscraper, as if Midtown Manhattan was a giant wishing well. Savini picked up the coin and left before another one could sting him.

“This chance encounter with a penny moving at 66 miles an hour was the beginning of my collection of coins that have stories,” says Savini. “The collection grew innocently to hundreds of coins, and collected dust in a binder.” Savini pocketed any coins he found. A 1990 penny from the Woodmere Train Station Café in New York. A 1968 yellow-painted dime, change from In & Out Burger in L.A. A penny found in a “give a penny, take a penny” dish at a deli. A quarter that was painted blue that he got as change from a truck stop in Arizona. A fingerprinted penny he found in his pocket.

After 9/11 Savini began photographing the coins he found as the series Change. For posterity’s sake, he photographed the money in the condition in which it was found. He used actual film, and only used PhotoShop for printing purposes. He explains, “Realism and the power of reality are an important part of the series.”

It is this realism that makes Change so fascinating. We live in an era in which digital retouching and plastic surgery, publicity stunts and spin doctors, and voice modulation and mockumentaries have become the norm. Even money has gotten a makeover, with collectible state quarters and safety-enhanced paper money.

“In recent years, as the dollar’s value changed for the worse, I began to look at the collection differently,” says Savini. “The Euro, China, globalization and other factors are affecting the value of the dollar in ways that ten years ago would have been unimaginable.”

It seems that these days, everything is subject to “change.”  As a backlash, people are searching for something real, something authentic. It’s given craze to unplugged and indie music, books like Found and Milk Eggs Vodka, reality TV (Savini himself has been a director of photography on numerous reality tv shows) and This American Life, and shabby chic and DIY aesthetics. Even if these trends might be bolstered by a larger corporate company and are staged or sliced and manipulated, at least they feel real. What it comes down to is that they feel personal.

And that’s what makes Change successful. The photographs are visually appealing, but aren’t particularly innovative (a quick search on Flickr reveals 54,433 photographs that match a search for “coin”). More so, Savini’s photographs are just that: copies or representations of the real thing, not the binder full of found coins. However, Savini is a wonderful storyteller that brings depth to his art.

He convincingly makes us reconsider the everyday objects in our life. Replete with endearingly genuine typos, he writes:

The photographs in Chnage [sic] are designed to bring the viewer up close to the money they use every day, surprising people who often admit they never really looked at change before. Full of detail and story, each photo on it’s [sic] own stands as an individual work of art, but as a group they take on a different role. Some of the coins feel as if they could be relics from ancient Rome and Greece, confusing something being produced today with something produced over 2000 years ago. Together the images question the value of money, the state of the dollar today, and into the future.

Change: Photographs of found coins are on view at Piola—a decidedly commercial pizza restaurants (located at 48 East 12th Street) in a city full of greasy dives—until June 30.

Savini has plans to turn Change into a book, which may in fact be a more compelling way for the artist to share his coin collection. If he chose to do so, he could tell the story behind how he found each coin. It would be interesting to hear about the laminated 1977 quarter he got as change in a 7-11. Why he’d stoop down on such a busy intersection as Seventeenth Street and Broadway just to pick up a penny. If he was purchasing equipment for photographing his coin collection when he got the black-painted dime back as change at Cameta Camera.

Coin collecting would probably be deemed about as uncool as stamp collecting, and we want to know, What are the most rare coins our readers have found? Or, if you’re more the type to go throwing your unwanted change off buildings or into fountains, Where are the most unique penny-throwing places you’ve encountered?

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For anyone who looks for cool bookstores the way “normal” people might look for say, the hot new club or the best French bistro look no further! Housing Works Used Book Cafe in Soho is everything you have ever wanted and never new you needed. The bookstore is a two level haven of cheap used books, rare collectibles and new must haves. The space is cozy and calming, chairs and tables are scattered over both floors inviting you to spend the afternoon. In the back is a full on cafe with great coffee, soups in the winter, pastries and more chairs and tables at which to sip coffee and enjoy whatever great book you’ve found to settle down with.
As if a killer book selection, a calm, comfy atmosphere and a prime Soho location weren’t enough, Housing Works is also host to many events– concerts, readings and the like. This Sunday they hosted the 8th annual Lit Mag Fair. For any literary snob or book-happy nerd (both qualities I consider compliments rather than insults), this is a euphoric experience. The store is filled with tables and tables or Literary Journals… all for only two dollars. Any for those of us who read (and submit writing to) these journals, we know these mags usually run us a ridiculous twenty dollars. I went Lit Mag crazy and bought seven journals full of the best new writers.
The only downside of the event is that it is billed as a networking opportunity but was not necessarily set up to accommodate that goal. Though magazine editors wandered the bookstore with name tags on it was not easy to approach them. It would have been better to have the editors stationed at booths, to facilitate interaction rather than making it awkward for writers and editors to find each other.
Nonetheless, it was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and Housing Works is a place I will return to often.

Following up on last week’s post about DC/Vertigo’s Transmetropolitan, I decided to write about one of Vertigo’s newer, very popular books, the harrowing masterpiece about life during wartime: The DMZ.

DMZ is quite possibly the most frightening comic book out there for very unexpected reasons: There are no superpowers. There are no amazing sci-fi advancements in technology. No forays into the mystic realms, no aliens. Just a thoroughly haunting vision of the worst aspects of U.S. militarism taken to the worst case scenario:

A second American Civil War. The forces of the U.S. Military vs. a homegrown insurgency borne out of the disgust and outrage of an international War-with-no-end that was once quaintly referred to as The War on Terror.

What makes the heartbreakingly intelligent DMZ so frightening is that it could actually happen.

DMZ is a “Day After Tomorrow” storyline, meaning a fiction based on the actual current events going on in our lives today. If I had to guess the year that DMZ takes place, I would guess 2009.

DMZ is currently in its 4th story ARC, with the first two arcs already available in TPB: On the Ground and Body of a Journalist. In the pages of the 2nd story arc, we learn how this new war on our very streets happened:

“The Wars [ie: Iraq, Afganistan etc.] were a million miles away. We had troops in four separate conflicts in three different continents. . . I remember when the Free Armies formed a government in Helena. They spread out from there. No one could grasp how it could happen. . .

“They laughed at this idea of redneck armies in pick-up trucks. The laughing didn’t last long. Pilots weren’t about to bomb small-town America. It all happened so fast that the Pentagon didn’t have time to whip up a propaganda campaign to paint the Free Armies as traitors.

“There are no borders or front lines for this war. It’s completely unconventional. The Free States are an idea, not a geographic entity.”

So that’s how it happened. It started in the West, secretly moving its way across the nation so that by the time the over-extended, shell-shocked military made their way back home to fight against their own friends and brothers, it had reached the shores of New Jersey.

So the DMZ, the contested land between The Free States and the remains of The United States is, of course. . . Manhattan.

So DMZ is about life during wartime, but more specifically, its about journalism during wartime. Our narrator and protagnist is Matty Roth, na assistant to hotshot war journalist Viktor Ferguson who gets gunned down over “The DMZ”. Roth, who appears to be the only survivor, is now an extremely important commodity to the United States and soon, The Free States as well.

And in a “city” (though “territory” is a more likely term for it) in which anyone can be sniped down from any hidden gunman in any of the remaining buildings throughout the wartorn area, the most important commodity a person can have it seems is:

A Press jacket. Word of Roth’s presence spreads through the DMZ quickly. And in a divided America, with Manhattan as the fulcrum to a very, very weighted scale, the favor of the only independent journalist in the territory is very, very valuable.

To the thorough relief of the reader, Matty Roth (who looks like any other shaggy-maned, scruffy-bearded cutey-boy journalist in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts) is incorruptable. No matter how many times he stares down the barrel of a gun, (and nearly shits himself each time, like any of us would!) he refuses to let himself be used.

More often than not, he finds himself as a go-between for the U.S. forces (Which include his own military father, whom Matt despises for typical “life-during-wartime” reasons: His parents divorced for poilitical reasons), forces within the DMZ. (His friend Zee who works as an emergency paramedic, the little militias that control various neighborhoods, etc.) and the Free Armies who control the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel and try to use Matt to push their own agenda. 

And what does Matt want? Well, it seems that even he’s not sure. He’s pulled in so many directions, with so much subterfuge and so many hidden agendas, that most of the time he’s just trying to report the elusive truth while staying alive and doing whatever seems right is each circumstance.

Matt’s inclination toward heroism is never in doubt, but like any of us, he makes the wrong decisions and trusts the wrong people, and is often running all over the bombed out streets of Manhattan trying to undo the trouble that he helped facilitate. Which is one of the numerous aspects of what makes DMZ so brilliant. Through the fog of war, it’s nearly impossible to tell what the “right” thing is at the time. It’s a lot easier through the lense of history.

What also makes DMZ a thrill to read (especially for us New York-a-philes) is the streets we have come to know and love like the back of our hands transformed into an almost lawless survival-of-the-fittest society.

As New York (in the real world) becomes more and more of a massive outdoor shopping mall with luxury condos popping up like black-heads on the face of a fifteen year-old McDonalds fry-cook, there is a twisted thrill in seeing Manhattan even worse than it was in 1977. With the Thompkins Sq. militia lobbing mortars at Stuy-town and the Central Park Conservancy turning into a ghost-militia that protects the trees, animals, and grows bamboo as a cheap source of fuel for the winter.

And of course, out of this latest chapter in the unsinkable history of New York, comes a new culture of street art, street theater, at the most real, uncorrupted-by-corporate-interest urban culture that has possibly ever existed in New York’s near 400 year history. People are struggling to stay alive, but that doesn’t mean they’re not also handing out fliers for their next art-gallery showing.

DMZ might just possibly be the most serious, heart-breaking, realistic comic-book out there. And if you love New York, and fear what might happen to it if the warmongers of the country remain in power, then pick up the first two TPBs, and take a good, long look at your current living situation and the loved ones around you.

And consider what you just might be willing to do to protect it.

Some Directors have left such a mark on American cinema that their style seems to have become its own genre of film. So let me set the record straight:

Martin Scorcese is a director. Not a genre.

Which is the problem with, I’m sorry to say, nearly every moment of the film Brooklyn Rules that stuffs every last Italian-American, Catholic, Brooklyn, blue collar, male-bonding, mafia-tinged, good-kid-trying-to-make-his-way-out-of-the-rough-and-tumble-neighborhood cliche into a mediocre attempt at emulating Scorcese’s early masterpiece Mean Streets.

Throw in a couple of scenes stolen directly from Saturday Night Fever, down to the interrupted sex in the backseat of the bar and romantic shots of the Verrazano bridge, and you’ve got a director who clearly wishes he had made one of the afformentioned films, not just cannibalized them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Brooklyn Rules is the story of three best friends from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A trio of Catholic School trouble-makers who find a dead body on the beach and each walk away with a momento.

Bobby takes the dog sitting in a carrying case in the back, the almost comically vain Carmine takes a zippo lighter and our protagonist Mike takes a revolver from the glove compartment. Making sure that we remember that gun for every slow, drawn out second of the film.

The boys grow up into Jerry Ferrara (from HBO’s Entourage) as Bobby, a dumb cheapskate who wants nothing more than to marry his girl, work for the Post Office (apparently, he’s too dumb for anything else) and pray at every Virgin Mary statue he passes.

Scott Caan, one of the few competent actors in this film becomes Carmine, with bulging biceps and a pathological fixation on his hair. Carmine of course, wants to get mobbed up. (And only mob-boss Ceasar Manganaro, played by the often bored-looking Alec Baldwin) is his way in.

And sadly, Michael, (who irritatingly narrates us through every second of film) is the work-a-day Columbia University classroom hustler. Pitifully, what little the screenwriter offered the character is then mangled by the talentless Freddie Prinze Jr.

The scenes are repetitive to the point where by the seventh time the boys are sitting around in classic Brooklyn locales drinking Budweiser, you must presume that the Milwauke based company was one of the film’s primary investors. When the esoteric scene that begins the film comes full circle at the end, it leaves the audience thinking. . . what. . . So that’s it?

Brooklyn Rules was directed by Michael Corrente whose unimpressive resume indicates that he’s not in line for an Oscar nod anytime soon. However, it was written by Soprano’s verteran Terrence Winter. It seems like he’s trying for his Scorcese moment, and clearly fails in his first attempt.

Rounding out the lifeless performances of the film is Mena Suvari as Ellen, Michael’s classroom love interest (from Connecticut of course, and has her birthday party at a bar in TriBeCa! Ooohhh, fancy!) She goes through her lines with absolutely zero chemistry with her goofball screen partner, in the back of her eyes, you can almost hear her saying (I went from American Beauty to this?)

The highlights of the film come from the clever barbs and one liners the boys from Bay Ridge lay on each other, the classic 1980’s nostalgia, and the English-mangling father of our boy Bobby, for whom each line is a hillarious hodge-podge of misused words.

Cliches can be fun sometimes. But stuff a movie full of them, and it leaves you wondering what, if anything, from this film was worth taking from it on its own merits.

For the past five years or so there’s been a healthy artistic anarchy brewing beneath the Highline on far west 21st street.  Right under our collective nose nests a hive for,” artists, programmers, hackers, activists, technologists, kids, and adults,” to study, create, and collaborate on images that marry the sultry sexiness inherent in the world of computer programming with the sweetly misunderstood progressive neo- modern art movement. 

The result:  Eyebeam! A warehouse sized imaginarium that acts as a live studio replete with physical labs and computer work stations.   The functioning studio part of the space is a two story area separated from the rest of the building by a glass wall.  A hand painted sign on the wall, “WE FUCK HERE M- F 10-6” screams of opportunity for those brave enough and talented enough to seek it. Yet, that’s not all kids!  Under the same rood resides an open, free exhibition space.  From now until the end of August that space is home to some of the genius creations conceived by Eyebeam’s industrious, uninhibited residents.   

It’s called SOURCE CODE and it’s a 10 year retrospective of programming, Eyebeam style. I visited Eyebeam the other day, completely sober, to check out the scene.  I left the joint riding a natural high, imbibed with the exuberance that only a truly unique  New York experience can instill. 

Here’s a wee bit of what I saw: 

I Shot Andy Warhol  By:  Cory Arcangel 

The basis of this piece is the classic Nintendo game Hogan’s Alley.  A game originally released in 1985 and designed to be used with the Nintendo lightgun.  The object of the game was to shoot gangsters while not shooting innocent bystanders. 

Well, this dude reprogrammed the game and titled it “Shoot Andy Warhol”.  The title screen shouts out the name at the viewer.  Then the next screen, just like the original game gives you simple instructions: 

“Shoot Andy’s Only”.  Then it shows what Andy looks like.  Don’t shoot:  the Pope, Flava Flav, or the Colonel, all followed by their images.  Trust me, it’s hysterical. 

High Seas  By:  Jennifer & Kevin McCoy 

This is an incredibly detailed model of the Titanic that’s about five feet long.  Circling the model is a track that slopes up and down like the humps of a roller coaster.  Riding this track is a camera and a spot light that flashes every few seconds. 

Behind the model is a ginormous screen projecting exactly what the camera circling the lil’ Titanic sees.  Because of the hilly shape of the track and the intermittent flashes of light it looks like we’re watching a movie of the Titanic bouncing around on the high seas in the middle of a lightning storm.  Pretty clever, no? 

There are a bunch more pieces on display, but words fail me.  This is an experience you need to see to believe and enjoy. 

Important Shit! 

 ·  The show runs until August 11!·       It’s right across from Chelsea Piers!·       For address and hours click HERE!

There are few playwrights I love as much as I adore Neil LaBute (Best known for his movie “In The Company of Men”) His plays are insightful, modern, simple, honest and funny. He takes ordinary people with ordinary flaws and ordinary lives and finds a story. His characters are perfectly three dimensional, and they do what we do, say what we say, and fail miserably as we fail miserably.

LaBute’s newest play, “In A Dark Dark House” is a story of two brothers. One of the brothers (Drew, played by Ron Livingston of “Office Space” fame!) is in a mental hospital dealing with substance abuse and possibly an earlier childhood trauma. His brother (Terry, played by Fredrick Weller) visits him in the hospital, and then visits the man who supposedly sexually abused Drew. Instead of meeting the abuser, he meets his young daughter Jennifer (Louise Krause) and enters into an inappropriate flirtation with her. Drew and Terry have to confront their pasts and their current mistakes, and find a way to accept their shared history and present relationship.

Although they play is entertaining, and balances expertly between comedy and drama, it is not LaBute’s best. While the story is interesting, and the characters complicated and believable, I wanted more to happen in the ninety minutes on stage. More problematic by far, however, was the questionable casting. Krause, playing sixteen year old Jennifer reads as a jaded twenty-something, not a naive, trouble teen. Until she pronounces her age I assumed she was a college grad. This alone drastically effects the stakes and energy in her scene with Terry. Terry (Weller) also seems out of place next to Livingston. Livingston is subtle and easy to watch, he seems to mesh well with LaBute’s casual dialogue. Next to him, Weller’s acting is too large and they seem to be in two separate shows.

In spite of the inexplicable casting and inconsistent acting, “In A Dark Dark House” is still proof of LaBute’s talent. It is not his best work, but it is a solid piece that is relateable and thoughtful. Director Carolyn Cantor does a fine job directing, the actors seem comfortable and at home on stage, their relationships are clear and the staging is expert, never awkward. Most impressive is the beautiful set design, by Beowulf Britt. the play is set outdoors in all three long scenes, and Britt’s set is sunny and dramatic, mutable and truly gorgeous. If nothing else, Britt’s set makes “In a Dark Dark House” exciting to watch, somehow managing to create a world that is both larger than life and decidedly natural. An impressive accomplishment and a good, if not fantastic, play.

In A Dark, Dark House plays at the MCC Theatre on Tues & Wed @ 7pm, Thur - Sat @ 8pm, Saturday @ 2pm, Sunday @ 3pm. It closes July 7.
Tickets available online.