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The New York Times announced this week Glen Berger, the playwright of reported media circus “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” signed on with Simon & Schuster to pen a book about the “most controversial musical in Broadway history.” It was also the most expensive, according to the Times.

Berger was charged with helping rewrite the play’s script after director Julie Taymor was fired and a new writer and director came onboard to make Spider-Man “more family- and tourist-friendly,” reports the Times. While the show received poor reviews, it’s apparently been steadily gaining popularity since, though the jury’s still out on whether this can be attributed to the train-wreck effect.

After all, who can forget spectators’ harrowing accounts of actors literally plunging into the crowd on opening night?

“REAR WINDOW coming to Broadway! When someone gets hurt in the SPIDER-MAN show, just wheel across the street and be the lead in this show,” tweeted screenwriter Brian Lynch.

The Daily News reported the show left a “trail of blood and broken bones” in its wake.

Gabriel van Aalst, head of concerts and touring at Academy of St. Martin In The Fields, saw the revised version of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” twice.

“The show is clearly flawed but still manages to have some engaging moments,” said van Aalst. “No matter what I feel about the music and the dialogue there is something to be said for the moment when a man dressed as Spider-Man takes a dive off the edge of the dress circle.”

“It’s thrilling,” he said.

Van Aalst has a unique relationship to the show — he wrote his thesis about the role of spectacle in mega musicals, particularly Spider-Man, which has its own chapter.

“For me the fascinating thing about Spider-Man was the access it gave the general public to the process of making a ‘blockbuster’ musical,” van Aalst said. “In particular the constant press attention and the court cases really opened up what is otherwise a closed world.”

Van Aalst said the book could be a useful tool in further opening up that world to the public. “I have no doubt that Glen Berger will have his own views on what went wrong (and right) in the genesis of the production and I certainly think that there will be an interest in the book,” he said.

“People love scandal and there is no question that Spider-Man provided it and itself capitalized on it so I don’t feel the new book should be criticized for continuing this trend,” said van Aalst.

“Having said that I still think that there still could be merit in the new book,” he added.

Tweeters of New York and beyond also had a lot to say about this development.

“I wonder who they’ll bring in to rewrite it,” tweeted one New York literary agent, who asked to remain anonymous.

He told The Protagonist while he’s seen neither incarnation of the show, he has some opinions about the book deal.

The agent said he was unwilling to shell out the big bucks for such a poorly reputed show. “But I did follow the news pretty regularly when it was still making headlines,” he said. “I have a background in theater, a love of Spider-Man comics, and a career in publishing — so the impulse to snark about the recent book deal was just too great to resist.”

Still others found reason to be genuinely excited. Jonathan Karp, publisher and executive vice-president of Simon & Schuster, thinks Berger’s book will be “insightful” and “just a good story,” as he told the Times.

Jason Zinoman, a theater writer for the Times, said book-writers everywhere should “rejoice” — presumably because Berger has taught us large-scale, public disaster is just another way of saying “future book deal.”

—Alissa Fleck

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is now claiming he asked Assemblyman Vito Lopez to step down following accusations against him of sexual harassment in the workplace. These claims follow evidence in recent weeks Silver agreed to pay $100,000 to settle workplace harassment claims made against Lopez. Silver also stripped Lopez of his Assembly chairmanship, reports Gothamist. 

As criticism was leveled against Silver, he responded he had originally asked Lopez to resign, but the 71-year-old Lopez was not happy to hear it. Silver told the New York Times he no longer believed Lopez would be able to fulfill his duties, but seemed to avoid the subject of the allegations altogether.

“He won’t be a committee chair anymore,” Silver told the Times, “and his ability will be impaired significantly as a legislator.” Silver, reportedly, was not able to convince Lopez to step down.

Lopez also formerly paid $32,000 to the two staffers making accusations against him, reports Gothamist. Other female staffers have also come forward, many anonymously, to report inappropriate advances made by Lopez against them.

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

In the last three days, six new cases of West Nile virus cropped up in the City, reports the New York Times. This is a sudden jump—it’s almost as many cases as have been seen in the City for the whole summer. Late August is, however, the peak time for West Nile virus, according to the Times.

There has been one death among the 14 total cases—the fatality was a man in his 80s who had recently been outside the city, reports the Times. 

The number of mosquitoes infected with West Nile is especially high—up 40 percent—compared with last year. The City has been spraying pesticides around various neighborhoods to protect residents, always providing advance notice.

—Alissa Fleck

Via Wiki Commons

The New York Times is reporting Con Ed may have overcharged numerous electricity consumers this summer because of limited access to meters during the lockout. Many customers were charged more than ever despite, in some cases, being out of town for much of the summer.

(by Alissa Fleck)

At first, reports the Times, Con Ed blamed July’s supposedly unusually warm weather conditions. After the Times called their bluff, explaining July was in fact not as hot as July of 2011, Con Ed changed their tune, blaming “union troubles,” according to Gothamist.

Con Ed decided charges based on meters in Staten Island, Westchester County and the Bronx which the company could read remotely during the lockout. A spokesman for Con Ed said meter readings in those locations were “10 to 15 percent higher than what [they] anticipated [them] to be during July.” Because of this, the company decided to add approximately 10 percent to electricity consumption estimates for customers whose meters were not read in July, reports the Times.

Reportedly, Con Ed will adjust consumers’ bills to the appropriate amount if they can prove they were overcharged. The bigger issue seems to be Con Ed taking its customers for a bunch of rubes.

Botched "Ecce Homo" Courtesy of Wiki Commons

“Despite Good Intentions,” states the headline of a New York Times piece about the elderly woman in Spain who performed an amateur “restoration” of a century-old church fresco, “a Fresco in Spain Is Ruined.” Good intentions or not, the woman destroyed a priceless, irreplaceable work of art.

80-year-old Cecilia Gimenez took to the more than 100-year-old representation of Jesus in a church in the town of Borja to “repair” the image, which had partially succumbed to moisture on the church walls, reports the Times. 

Would the subject of her intentions be so thoroughly broached if she were, say, a middle-aged amateur painter who brazenly took to the fresco, armed only with paints and her own ego? Would we be discussing her “Surprisingly Avant-Garde Results,” as Art Info describes, for which she is all but entirely unapologetic?

To suggest Gimenez’s actions are whimsically ignorant is to infantilize someone who knew full well what she was doing, what the piece represented and her own abilities (or lack thereof). She was not a child who unknowingly went at the piece with crayons, though that’s what the final product suggested.

Art Info details the result: “The direction of his eyes has shifted to a preposterous angle, down and to the left towards the beholder, rather than looking to the upper right. The nose is flattened like that of an African mask. Next to the chimp-like headgear, the new painting’s mouth is potentially the strangest alteration: The jaw appears slack with Jesus’s tongue seemingly sticking out in either lifelessness or mockery. All in all, what was a minor work of traditional iconography has become a masterpiece of contemporary surrealism.”

A masterpiece? Contemporary surrealism? She did not merely touch the painting up, she completely altered its appearance. While there is undeniably humor to the situation, to paint Gimenez’s act as excusable or sweetly naive because of her age is to engage in ageism, and ageism is damaging to society. She had the presence of mind to pre-meditate and carry out the act, and we must not react as though she were an infant.

Instances of art vandalism are harshly punished, whatever the person’s intentions. Earlier this year, a man walked up to a 1929 Picasso in Houston, and flagrantly spray-painted it. He was an artist, making an artistic statement, reports the art blog Hyperallergic.com.

The man then released a manifesto, detailing the purpose behind his actions: “I dedicate this to all the people out there who have suffered for any injustice of every kind. To those abused by their loved ones. For those abused by their government. For those who were abused by organized religion. And to Picasso from artist to artist. The beast is meant to be conquered. Picasso loved bullfighting because he knew at the end of the dance, someone had to die and on the day it was his turn.”

The 22-year-old was later charged with criminal mischief and felony graffiti, reported the Houston Press. 

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

By Alissa Fleck

The New York Times recently reported yoga studio owners feel unfairly targeted by city agencies. Three years ago, New York State government proposed regulations requiring schools that trained yoga instructors to obtain licenses to do so. Eventually, yoga studios were exempted from the regulation, but the obstacles for studios only continued from there.

Now, yoga studios in the City are saying the State is looking for any way to get money out of the booming industry. As we reported before at the Press, the State Department of Taxation recently decided to exclude yoga studios in NYC from the 4.5% sales tax implemented on other gyms and fitness centers. This followed a deluge of audits of local yoga studios though, in which the department threatened to charge back taxes on many studios, many of which were completely unaware of the status of the regulation.

City yoga studios say the government harassment does not stop there. The Department of Buildings has fined studios for not having the appropriate permit, reports the Times. Additionally, the Labor Department has gone after studios for declaring instructors independent contractors instead of employees. Studio owners believe these actions are unfair and unreasonable. Declaring an instructor an employee rather than an independent contractor, when that instructor teaches at multiple studios, incurs an enormous amount of burdensome and unnecessary costs.

J. Brown, the owner of Abhyasa Yoga in Brooklyn, told the Times: “[Agencies] think they can reinterpret statuses and apply them to yoga.”

While the sales tax was recently declared not applicable, studios continue to struggle with government agencies over the other issues. This is particularly hard for yoga studios as, while yoga itself may be an increasingly popular industry, “yoga studios operate on shoestring budgets,” Alison West, executive director of Yoga for New York, told the Times. 

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

How does one do—notoriously pessimistic and humorously insightful essayist— David Rakoff’s work justice? How does one begin to fumble for the words to embody his literary range? Rakoff, who just passed away at the age of 47, wrote and spoke in a way that so remarkably reflected our uncertain collective reality—in his profundity, in his candidness, and in analogies so apt and relevant they surely required years of careful research into our human minutiae. In Rakoff’s essays, there’s deep pain, there’s sardonic humor, there’s desperate hatred, there’s even rhyme (sometimes). In reading Rakoff’s essays, you find yourself wondering over and over, how did he know? How did he so scrupulously pinpoint the intricacies of the human psyche? Below are just a few surface-scratching must-read hits from Rakoff’s prolific career:

In “The Waiting,” an essay which appeared last year in the New York Times Magazine, Rakoff describes the process of battling a long illness, while the greatest struggle at times seems resisting the urge to overanalyze his caregivers‘ words and demeanors as significant, as a predictor of outcomes. Rakoff writes, of the encouraging and empathetic feedback we are programmed to deliver to one another, “…as an anticipatory tool, it does not soften the blow, indeed it does the opposite. It leaves you exposed, like grabbing onto the trunk of a tree for support in a storm only to find the wood soaked through and punky and coming apart in your hands.” Undeniably, anyone who is human comprehends the feeling Rakoff captures, remembers the exact moment even, when plumbing the depths of desperation he loaded undue significance on the words of another. Anyone who is human recalls the moment in which he became—however fleetingly—superstitious.

In the essay “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather,” which Rakoff recited on This American Life earlier this year, he describes the experience of having a nerve in his left arm severed, causing him to have the occasional “gesture of someone who danced…which is very different,” he says, “from having been a dancer.” During the show, Rakoff elucidates the processes our bodies undergo, which we rarely question until they manifest as physical abnormalities. “There are some questions in life the very speaking of which are their own undoing,” he explains, for instance, “is this real?” It is the question, ultimately, which awakens him to the reality of his situation. Rakoff manages to take his ravaging sickness, and not only approach it with objectivity, but extrapolate to some wider, more philosophical meaning about the nature of consciousness. Whether or not he fully intends to, Rakoff can scarcely avoid offering us an outstretched hand, a gateway toward common identification. It’s never merely his experience, but what his tells us about all our own.

In 1996, on This American Life, Rakoff described his time spent dressed as Sigmund Freud in Barney’s department store Christmas window display in “Christmas Freud.” A version of the essay also appears in his collection, Fraud. “In the window I fantasize about starting an entire Christmas Freud movement,” says Rakoff, waxing on the complex relationship between psychoanalysis, spirituality and commerce across generations. “In department stores across America, people leave display window couches snifflingly and meaningfully whispering, ‘Thank you, Christmas Freud,’” he writes. Not afraid to go over the top, Rakoff undauntedly appropriated the situations which befell him with the mastery and dexterity of a world-class storyteller.

Rakoff writes in “All The Time We Have,” in his collection Half-Empty, of the death of his therapist of ten years (Rakoff was something of a self-professed therapy junkie over the years). The tribute is poignant and heart-wrenching, as he explores the complex relationship with a man who, in all his human vulnerability, ultimately required Rakoff’s approval just as badly. Rakoff writes so acutely of the push-and-pull struggle for approval, the hunger that reveals itself to be quite insatiable, the games we humans play, the waters we test, only to discover we are insatiable. Rakoff writes of this challenge we do not want to win because we fear its results: “this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,” even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with single-minded concentration from day one.”

Finally, but by no means least or remotely comprehensively, Rakoff writes of attending a Tibetan Buddhist retreat led by Steven Seagal in an essay also appearing in Fraud. Portraying this outlandish, over-the-top New Age-y, self-help ritual, Rakoff is at his most poetic: “Twenty years ago we would have been readers of Robert Persig. Now we own well-thumbed copies of The Jew in the Lotus. We’ve done yoga. We’ve been lactose intolerant.” His fresh, concise commentary, which easily disavows the usual stereotypes—while marrying the expected with the uncanny and cynical—is so slick, so layered, there’s something new and potent to unearth on every read.

Rakoff published three books of essays and contributed widely to anthologies, newspapers and magazines. He was a regular on the radio show This American Life. All Rakoff’s contributions to This American Life can be found here.

Photo Courtesy of Wiki Commons

New shelters are opening across the City, as a record number of homeless New Yorkers  hits the streets. According to the New York Times, the 43,731 homeless people currently in shelters is an 18% jump from last year. The City has already had to open five shelters in the Bronx, and two in Manhattan and Brooklyn each, to accommodate the rising population.

Gothamist reports this rise in homelessness directly coincides with the City cutting Advantage, a program which helps subsidize apartments for formerly homeless people who maintain employment for two years. A weak economy and rising housing costs are also to blame, according to Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless, reports the Times. 

Seth Diamond, the commissioner of homeless services, told the Times the program was very effective, and its abrupt end has made things difficult. Illegal hotels in the City are now being transformed into shelters, while some still retain long-term residents alongside the formerly homeless tenants.

The Times also reported neighbors frequently only receive a few weeks notice of homeless shelters cropping up in their areas. Emergency procedure allows for these shelters to be instituted by the City, without the City consulting Community Boards (though they must be notified in advance). Homeless shelters are required by New York law, though there are often limits on how long a person can stay.

“The current shelter census is the highest ever, officials said; the number does not represent the total homeless population in the city, because some people avoid the shelter system,” reported the Times. There are currently 228 homeless shelters in the City.

—Alissa Fleck

photo by Gerard Stolk

The debate over Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban raged on Tuesday, having started at 1 p.m. but lasting over 80 minutes past its initial expected ending time, the New York Times reports.

Representatives from the board of health, union advocates, consumer advocates, health experts politicians, even a speaker from Auntie Annie’s pretzel chain, flocked Long Island City to discuss how restricting the sale of sugar-based drinks over 16 oz. would affect both consumers and suppliers. Sodas this size would be legal in grocery stores, but illegal at street vendors, movie theaters, and restaurants.

But the Times says the expected approval is still likely, and that the next time the two sides met, it could possibly be in a courtroom.

According to the Times’ live blog of the event, as of 4:24 p.m., most representatives left the meeting, with only a handful of speakers left.

Mayor Bloomberg initially proposed the ban to reduce obesity in New York City which, according to Bloomberg’s numbers, affects 60% of the city’s population. Opponents cite there not being a proven connection between sugar and obesity and diabetes.

The meeting wasn’t expected to produce any sudden changes.

-Nick Gallinelli