Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

The end of the summer’s nearly upon us New Yorkers, and you don’t want to be caught at home on the couch, or futon, or…seat cushion on the floor. Don’t forget the City’s beaches close after Labor Day, so you might just want to take this time off from the rat race to relax and soak up a little Labor Day weekend sunshine. If you’re looking for a little more action though, check out a couple of these exciting Labor Day festivities going down around New York City:

-Labor Day 5k and 10k On Roosevelt Island

If you want to get moving this Labor Day, in a different kind of race, NYCRUNS will be hosting a 5k and 10k race on Roosevelt Island, complete with post-race breakfast. The action begins Monday morning at 10 a.m, and pre-registration is available on the NYCRUNS website.

-Unicycle Festival on Governor’s Island

Yes, you heard that right. Unicyclists will unite this Labor Day weekend on Governor’s Island to show of their wheel(s). All sorts of spectacles guaranteed to transpire. Helmets are strongly encouraged.

-Electric Zoo Festival

The Electric Zoo music festival is happening all Labor Day weekend in Randall’s Island Park. Featured acts include David Guetta, Benny Benassi, Skrillex, Knife Party, the Bloody Beetroots and tons more. Electric Zoo is an all-ages electronica festival, guaranteed to get you dancing so hard you’ll need Monday just to recuperate.

-Wasabassco Burlesque

On Friday, The Bell House in Brooklyn is celebrating Labor Day with “Take This Job & Shove It,” which includes “work-related burlesque and go-go.” Admission is $12, but the show is free if you dress all in white. There will be pickleback drink specials and burgers on the grill. We’re thinking this sounds too good to pass up!

-Improv Show Ft. 30 Rock Comedians 

Scott Adsit and John Lutz, of 30 Rock fame, are going to combine their improv chops for the first time ever this coming Labor Day. It’s going down at the Upright Citizens Brigade  comedy club in Chelsea. Head over to the UCB to get your laugh on before/after checking out…

-Food & Drink Specials All Around Town 

NY Mag has provided an extensive list of food and drink specials around the City, including everything from Oyster eating competitions to deep fried Oreos. They’re even making it easy and giving you a map, in case you’re stumbling around in a food coma come Labor Day weekend.  Check it out here.

Summer’s wrapping up, so don’t miss this exciting action! Let’s face it, New Yorkers, we could all use it.

—Compiled by Alissa Fleck

This Year's NY Tropfest - photo by Tropfest

It’s become a park staple by now— every Monday throughout the summer a classic movie is shown in front of Bryant Park’s iconic lawn. From Psycho to Wizard of Oz to Indiana Jones, the midtown cinematic summer series continues to provide us a big screen to see the Alfred Hitchcocks, the George Lucases, and the Humphrey Bogarts of Hollywood. And we don’t complain. I, personally, love it. I go almost every Monday.

This weekend, though, was a refreshing new taste of cinema. Instead of the classics that made what movies are today, the park teamed up with Hugh Jackman (who is as good a host as he is an actor) to deliver terse, snappy, identifiable short films to a Saturday-evening crowd.

The quirky Australian-based Tropfest, self-dubbed “the world’s largest short film festival,” had its inaugural New York edition this weekend, and served as a spot for casual and fervent moviegoers as well as the fest’s star-studded judge panel.

And as far as someone who has attended prior Tropfests before, this year’s debut was a success.

“I was planning (on coming), because I’m from Sydney,” said Nicole… from Sydney. “I had been to one in Sydney, and (in New York) there’s a lot of people… but it’s the same kind of vibe.”

“She invited me,” echoed Luke, speaking about his Australian companion. “I had no idea what it was but I came and was pleasantly surprised, I really enjoyed it.”

“Looking for the strength of the idea, rather than slickness or technical merit,” the festival prides itself in giving opportunities to aspiring and news filmmakers. It “whittles” a pool of hundreds of entries down to eight, and awards $20,000 to the film the celebrity panel —this Tropfest featured Bridemaids’s Rose Byrne, 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander, Dark Horse’s Ted Hope, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Scott Foundas— deems best at the end of the night. According to Jackman’s preface, and the festival’s site, there are only a few restrictions regarding film production. The only rules are that films cannot exceed seven minutes and must include a TSI— the Tropfest Signature Item.

(This year’s New York TSI, fittingly, was a bagel. All films, oddly enough, had a bagel make a cameo at one point in the film (see above: quirky).)

It turns out, over 10,000 people, a packed house by Bryant Park standards, were interested enough to attend the fest and take a peak at the country’s eight best short films. It seems they weren’t disappointed.

“It was a spur of the moment thing for me, and I’m glad I came,” said Mike, who thought Elvis: The Lonely Hunter of Circle Beach should have won. “I enjoyed the films immensely, and yeah I’ll definitely be coming back for next year.

The fest’s raconteurs used their formatting freedom and time restrictions as a prompt for some interesting narration and ideas. Despite an anacoluthic Killer Bagels from Outerspace, films were hilarious (Elvis), intense (Elevator), uplifting (Emptys), and extremely clever (The Break-Up Tour).

photo by Syrenmuse

One NY Press writer is a bit confounded that The Break-Up Tour didn’t win the grand prize.

After all eight contestants were shown —and this after a segment that showed the best movies from prior Tropfests— the judging panel gave first-place prize to Emptys, which is a quick dive into the world of the country’s impecunious bottle collectors.

Tropfest will make its rounds around the globe throughout before returning to New York with 16 finalists next year, stopping in Las Vegas, Arabia, New Zealand, China, India, Paris, and it’s home, Australia. And while it continues to grow, it will also become smaller.

TropfestMicro is a new branch of the fest, and is a competition featuring super-short, 70-second films.

P.S. If you’re interested in entering next year’s New York contest, the TSI is “bridge”, with no distinction between the game, and the traffic-bearing structure.

–Nick Gallinelli

At What Address Would You Like to Live?
Maybe right on Gramercy Park, with a key to the park so I could stand inside and look at passersby through the fence and say “Mwah ha haaa! You can’t come in here!”

When Did You First Feel Like a New Yorker? What Happened?
I guess when I figured out the subway system—so after about eight years.

What Is Your Favorite Watering Hole for Lunch? For Dinner?
I like Good in the West Village for brunch. (Does this mean I get free lemon ricotta pancakes next time I go in there?)
For dinner, I always love going to Supper in the East Village. Love the vibe in that place, as well as the food.

What Part of the New York Lifestyle Can’t You Live Without?
That it’s open all night and that you know if you wanted to order food at two in the morning, you could.

What Is Your Most Memorable New York Moment?
Walking out of my apartment door and seeing a completely naked homeless man getting ready for his day in the driveway next door. Oh, is this is supposed to be a good memorable moment? Umm—my debut on SNL?

What Is Your Favorite New York Sound?
When the Jets and the Sharks get into a street fight and they sing it out.

What Was Your Worst-Dressed New York Moment?
Recently, I wore a red T-shirt and red hooded sweatshirt into the Duane Reade, and a woman in the aisle immediately asked if I worked there. That was probably a fashion low.

What Is Your Favorite Way to Get Around New York, and Why?
Walking, because you don’t have to deal with traffic jams and subway delays and you can strut down the street and sing “Stayin’ Alive” to yourself in your head as your own soundtrack. “Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk….”

What’s Your Favorite Transportation Moment in the City?
That time I got to that place in a cab without having an anxiety attack.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
Honestly, I’d want to be a therapist, and I think New York City is probably the therapy capital of the world…

This article originally appeared in the April 2012 edition of Avenue, avenueinsider.com.

Right there, whenever you like, on your browser, iPhone or iPad. Yes.
Let’s be real: Nobody but Nielsen families watches TV on a television set anymore. I bet so few people watch “TV” TV that only a few of you understood my killer Nielsen family joke!

To be honest, who has time to sit around and watch the tube? Most of it’s not must-see; if it is—trust me—some bar in Williamsburg has a theme night for it. Not to mention how totally unhip it is to actually watch TV these days. We all know kids these days are watching the Internet just like the rest of us. If you are watching TV, it’s likely you’re using a DVR to do it, which is sort of what Aereo is about.

All the way back in 2009, Vishesh Kumar and Sam Schechner reported in the Wall
Street Journal, “The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a new type of digital video recorder from Cablevision Systems Corp., [which set] the stage for wider use of the technology.” That, of course, was the good ol’ Cablevision DVR Plus; much lauded for not requiring a small object in a room but derided for being unfathomably
slow in the beginning. When Cablevision launched their bright idea, a slew of networks sued them too. Cablevision hired a lawyer and won their case—no spoilers, but Aereo just hired the same one.

The original defense rested on the fact that DVR Plus members were basically doing the same thing TiVo lets you do: recording content that anybody with an antenna and a TV has free access to. Every recording was saved to an individual’s own private virtual DVR storage. It’s very much like when Universal and Disney sued Sony
because the Betamax was considered an evil piracy device. Aereo is is likely to use the Cablevision defense because their whole system works by allotting members their own private pair of micro-antennae located on the company’s Brooklyn rooftop— in effect, you’re paying Aereo to hold on to your antenna for you.

Like millions and millions of my contemporaries, to me, the Internet equals an Absolutely Everything Machine. If it’s not on the Internet, I don’t know about it. Even if it is on the Internet, if it’s not in the cheap-to-free price range, I actually do not want it. Aereo’s $12/month price is not bad at all. If you add in the price of monthly Netflix and Hulu Plus accounts, the price tag for your TV diet is still way less than my grandfather pays for cable. After an extended Beta, Aereo launched for New York residents on March 14th. New users get a 90-day free trial. Their website looks nice and the video quality is just fine when you’re watching it live—that’s right: live streaming video.

All this actually-on-the-air-right-now content reminded me of what a huge letdown it was back in the day when there was “nothing on!” But with Aereo, I flipped ahead in the guide a bit, set it to record 30 Rock, did things, came back at 9 p.m. and was actually giddy! To think, my very own, brand-new episode of 30 Rock saved snug in my 40 hours of DVR storage space on the Aereo cloud and—What?! Under the Recordings tab, I found
a friendly, devil-red line of text that read: “Not recorded: System error.”

I felt feelings then that I hadn’t felt since I once forgot to put a new VHS tape
in for the Star Trek: The Next Generation series finale. There’s bound to be issues at first. And an episode of Seinfeld and an airing of the Addams Family movie recorded just fine later on.

Broadcasters need to stop and take stock of their industry. Here is another example, of many, of a business model showing us that the future of television is not allergic to revenue. But still, these clunky old brands are so afraid of reality that they’ve become incapable of taking all this money I’ve got sitting around.

Services like Aereo could be a non-candy lifesaver for these guys. All of the ingredients are there: TV, Internet, willing consumers and money. And think of how much more in touch networks would be with all the data available from a web audience. Instead of spending cash picking on the new kids, legacy media outfits might consider a few smart investments.

Don’t be afraid of working together to make life easier for consumers.
How do you get your sitcoms? Think the plaintiffs are right? Let us know at nypress.com!
Follow @44carib on Twitter, just because.