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Elevators Gobble Up New Yorkers

Jerry — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:06:16 +0000

Former "Oz" actor Granville Adams has been arraigned for allegedly pushing a man down an elevator shaft at the Chelsea nightclub BED on Saturday. He claims it was self-defense. What’s so strange about the whole thing is it’s an incident that could have been one of the many violent acts from an episode of the HBO prison drama where it wasn’t unusual for an inmate to off someone by using a convenient open elevator.

But the city’s elevators were hungry for more. Two men tumbled down a Queens high-rise elevator shaft the following day and weren’t discovered until 12 hours later. You know director Dick Maas (no that’s not some dirty joke) already predicted NY elevators would act erratically and start their attack on the city’s innocent in his film Down (aka The Shaft) about a killer elevator.

Now we’re not implying that the elevators are on attack mode—just be careful not to repeatedly push that button and piss it off today.

Once There Was a Village

Jerry — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:07:25 +0000

Instead installing those Corian countertops in your East Village tenement, it’s about time you included a gentrification history lesson in your weekend agenda. The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre gives a good dose of the past for all those NY newbies in Once There Was a Village at La MaMa.

The "ethno-opera" was inspired by the works of Yuri Kapralov, and the frenetic narrative encapsulates nearly 400 years of history in Lower Manhattan using found objects, puppets, song (the Hungry March Band play live on stage) and dance. Think gentrification is anything new: watch as the Dutch "clean up" the swamp where the Native Americans lived, and pigs (as in swine) are replaced by a "cleaner" city thanks to the English, and each successive generations brings a new wave of immigrants who add their own taste to the squalor of the East Village.

Maybe you remember Adam Purple and his Garden of Eden before it was razed for public housing. But if not, it’s all there. Of course, it’s told through found objects like vacuum cleaners, piano viscera, ironing boards, hoses, mob buckets and all the rest of the junk that collects on the neighborhood’s streets.

Maybe the world doesn’t send it’s tired, huddled masses to the city any longer. But their ghosts remain.

Northsix Nixed

Jerry — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:22:48 +0000

Unless you were online before last night’s farewell show at Northsix, you were left standing out in the cold. The club’s website posted this comment:

**WE REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THAT, FOR REASONS BEYOND OUR CONTROL (ConEdison disconnected power to the building one day too early), TONIGHT’S FINAL NORTHSIX SHOW HAS BEEN CANCELED. WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE TO THOSE WHO PURCHASED TICKETS AND, ESPECIALLY, TO THE BANDS THAT SO GRACIOUSLY AGREED TO PLAY OUR LAST SHOW.

So ConEd actually did something EARLY for once? The venue tried to (unsuccessfully) move the show next door to Galapagos. Oh well, sometimes you go out in a burst of glory, but usually this is the way a club ends: with a whimper.

Photo courtesy of Johnny Leather