Laurence Tamaccio lives near the West Side Highway, the part that exposes its aged, rusty underbelly and concrete legs, held high above Riverside Park South. In his view, it’s an eyesore—and he wants to cover it with vines and waterfalls.

“Seeing it on a daily basis, it started to sort of wear me down aesthetically,” he said.

Tamaccio, an architect who describes his job as “making things that look awful look better,” posted slides of his High Line-esque vision on YouTube. Trellises and ivy cover the highway’s pillars from 61st Street to 72nd street in the digital image of Tamaccio’s dream.

Tamaccio, who lives on Riverside Boulevard, has launched a petition to achieve community support, though it hasn’t circulated widely yet.

Community Board 7 passed a resolution to support “continued exploration,” but Tamaccio says, “The community is not as aware as it needs to be.”

Community Board 7 Chair Mark Diller said it’s safe to say that no one finds the highway attractive. He added, “I have not heard other proposals to beautify the highway.” He has heard, though, efforts to keep the highway elevated for people who use the park beneath it.

Heather Lipton of 140 Riverside Blvd. said, “Vines would be gorgeous,” though she hadn’t considered the highway to be an issue before.

“After a while you kind of get used to it,” said Leslie Pilcher, 31, of West 63rd Street.

Tamaccio doesn’t believe painting the highway would be enough.

John Hart, an artist who has lived nearby for over 20 years, disagrees. “A light blue would be better,” he said, to “blend it in with the sky.” The vines on the structure, he said, “would draw more attention to it.”

Jerry Julian, 45, who has lived in the area for several months, said he agrees with Tamaccio that the structure needs to be reworked. “I would love to do what Boston did with the Big Dig and put it underground,” he said.

There have been efforts to rebuild the highway underground. It was originally elevated from 72nd Street to Chambers Street but a downtown section collapsed in 1973, leading to a project called “Westway,” which died after years of controversy. Then there was a plan for the Trump (later Extell) developers to rebuild the park and bury the highway but necessary federal transportation funds have yet to be acquired.

“People are under the impression that ultimately it’s going to be underground,” Tamaccio said. There is space for a tunnel, but after Hurricane Sandy sent Hudson River water onto the park, Tamaccio thinks it’s less likely the tunnel will ever be built.

There are skeletal ramps from the old highway, protruding from the new one above the park south of 72nd Street. Tamaccio sees these shelf-like pieces as potential waterfall areas.

He says the skeletal strips of old highway have preferable structure, upheld by arches. The elevated track for the 7 train in Queens also has a pleasing pattern of arches, he says, but most of the highway over Riverside Park South seems like a “patch-up” job.

His plan has grown to include gray water catching systems to make use of drainage pipes and a year-round café to assist with funding—though after Sandy, the café should be elevated, he said.
Drawing from how the High Line came about, Tamaccio says the next stage is to form a nonprofit organization. He’s talking to experts, officials and collaborators.

“It’s my community and it affects thousands of other people,” he said, adding, “It’s part of the Manhattan greenway.”

He may be a law firm secretary by day, but there’s far more to the New York-based polymath who is Tony Wolf than his day job. What his law firm colleagues may not know is Wolf has a rapidly expanding page on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

Wolf is a bit of a closet internet sensation. He’s a comedic short film and voiceover actor, on the perpetually evolving brink of internet fame. While Wolf pushes paper by day, by night he dons eclectic costumes, explores the full potential of his voice’s pitch and tone and even partakes in the occasional, radical body modification.

Recently, he buzzed his head and dyed the stubble grey, even giving himself a fake bald spot and receding hairline, for a role as the late Steve Jobs, never knowing if the video would go anywhere. Known in part in his niche community for his voluminous locks, Wolf foreshadowed this move in a song he improvised and recorded in 2007 called “The Faux Hawk Song.” The 41-year-old, occasionally curmudgeonly, Greenpoint resident lets it be known he has ambivalent feelings toward hipsters, to whom he attributes the hairstyle’s popularity.

In fact, the first thing that landed Long Island-born Wolf on IMDB was his role as “Naked Abe Lincoln” for a comedic short called “Hipster Job” set in Williamsburg. This followed 12 years of stage acting after leaving college with a degree in English literature.

Now, Wolf spends nights and weekends in the “studio,” wherever that happens to be, never more than a text message away from his “producer,” Mike Turney, known fondly as “Producer Mike.” With over 40 videos under their belts, they collectively refer to themselves as “The Action Room.” Wolf has worked with other producers as well, and landed parts ranging from a commercial for the Sci-Fi channel to voiceover work hawking DVDs on VH1.

Wolf is a man wholeheartedly devoted to his art and potential for upward mobility. When it comes to self-promotion, however, he vacillates between waxing on grandiose dreams of Hollywood, Broadway and hosting the Oscars, and humbly conceding he’s “not even internet famous” yet. In the world of YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and similar platforms, however, “fame” as we’ve known it is being redefined — those 15 minutes expedited and more widely distributed, like a kind of celebrity socialism.

In the fast-paced world of comedic internet videos, Wolf says you can never be too quick with a brilliant notion. If you don’t immediately project your brainchild into cyberspace, upload it to sites like “College Humor” or “Funny or Die,” where Wolf’s videos have performed quite well and even become “featured selections,” your joke can get snatched up by the likes of comedic actor Jerry O’Connell. This happened to Wolf.

Wolf notes: O’Connell’s Tom Cruise Scientology spoof may have gotten more of the limelight than his, but comedian Patton Oswalt personally sent Wolf’s producer two separate emails, saying Wolf’s version was “way funnier.”

It’s not just about speed, though speed is imperative — Wolf says the most successful videos never go on too long — it’s also about nailing the jokes. Describing a particular shoot, Wolf says: “We did about 10 takes and you would think the last would be the best, but it was in fact the penultimate take we used.”

Like the Tom Cruise video released several years ago, Wolf’s roles are almost always relevant to popular culture and current affairs. Most recently he acted in a short parodying Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s famously colorless addresses to New Yorkers during Hurricane Sandy’s rampage. In Wolf’s artistic rendition, Bloomberg’s ASL interpreter — who gained an internet following of her own for being animated and “hot” — gets frisky with the Mayor.

The chameleonic Wolf has also taken on Donald Trump, Daniel Day-Lewis and even Hitler. Wolf derives some of the greatest joy from reactions by strangers and friends alike to his imitations and likenesses, but this internet “celebrity” is not too proud to glitter a bit when his parents — including a father known around his hometown for his striking good looks — fawn over his parodic performances as well.

Wolf often even gets double-takes on the street from people who think he’s Matt Lauer, Will Arnett or, perhaps, a mysteriously young Bob Saget.

“My agent tried to get me seen for Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” says Wolf. “Okay, manager who functions as an agent.” For an internet actor like Wolf, the promotion and production process are often fairly makeshift.

Wolf does a lot of his own promotion via, naturally, the internet. He’s snatched up all the domains he can, but unfortunately, “TonyWolf.com is taken already by a Christian, fundamental-seeming inspirational speaker, singer and comedy guy,” explains Wolf.

He adds: “He’s also an illustrator. He’s like 60 and bald and midwestern. It’s very weird that he and I have a lot of the same talents.”

“Maybe when I become super-famous I can buy TonyWolf.com away from Other Christian Tony Wolf,” he says, with an edge of hope.

Check out more Tony Wolf at tonywolfactor.com.

Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

by Adel Manoukian

If you’re a young woman taking the train, you may be filmed or photographed and not even know it.

John Zippy has uploaded 35 videos with titles like “Sexy Asian Girls” or “Hot Nerd Girl” onto his Youtube account and about 102 photographs of unsuspecting females on his blog entitled  “New York Subway Girls” since late February.

The 42-year-old man hides a camera in a Starbucks coffee cup to capture images of women he deems attractive, according to the NY Post.

Police figure they can do little to nothing about it as “intimate” filming of people without their consent can be brought to court but taping people in public is not a crime. Courts would have to decide what they consider “intimate” despite the invasion of privacy aspect since women are either sitting or walking in the videos and images.

Zippy understands that many people see this as “creepy”, as one of his videos shows what is up a blonde’s skirt as she reads a magazine, but he claims he does this for the sake of art.

“I have over the years had conversations with people…about how they saw the ‘most beautiful,’ ‘the hottest,’ ‘most amazing,’ ‘the finest’ woman on the subway followed by a vivid description worthy of a sonnet,” said Zippy in an email to the NY Post.

“I decided to try and capture this common occurrence in one place where people could share and comment in an open and nonjudgmental manner.”

Since news spread of this man, Youtube has taken down his account due to violations of the website’s nudity policy.

By John Demetry for City Arts

First Penn Jillette’s passionate and principled radio attack on the racism and classism of Obama’s War on Drugs went viral, bringing politics to YouTube. Now, Oliver Stone uses the internet platform to bring art to advertising for Savages, his new dramatic film about marijuana trafficking opening July 6. Art is the necessary extension of Jillette’s persuasive reasoning. In Week 1 of Savages – Interrogation Series, Stone (who wrote Brian De Palma’s 1983 Scarface) suggests the human cost of the criminal world wrought by prohibition.

Freedom to Marry (FTM) sparked its campaign to win the right to same-sex marriage in New York State last year with a series of short videos featuring charming, engaging gay couples–not least among them George Constantinou and Farid Ali Lancheros–that put a human face on the issue and helped insure the movement’s success.

Farid Ali Lancheros and George Constantinou with their son and daughter, Milena and Gustavo, at their restaurant Bogota Latin Bistro. Photo by Jonathan Springer.

“It was very much a fulfillment of our approach of giving the reachable but not-yet-reached personal, local stories that open hearts and change minds, as the president recently described,” said Evan Wolfson, founder and president of FTM and a civil rights lawyer who has argued cases all the way up to the Supreme Court.

The videos highlighted the couples’ commitment and sincerity, nudging viewers to the conclusion that they deserve a chance at marriage just like anybody else.
Where are they today? Constantinou and Lancheros are about to get married, if only they can find an hour or two to tear themselves away from their thriving, demanding business and hurry down to the courthouse for a civil ceremony. (The celebration will come later.)

Their daily life constitutes a version of the classic American Dream: A young couple, the hard-working offspring of striving immigrants, sets up a household in Brooklyn, opens a restaurant a few blocks away, puts in the sweat, builds the business and, after a few years, decides to start a family.

“I guess you’d have to say we’re living the gay American dream,” Lancheros said. “It’s astounding. And it’s really testament to the fact that with determination, faith and action, all things are possible.”

The first and most obvious question–how did they have children?– is answered in their baby shower video. (Go to YouTube and search “George and Farid” or “Farid and George’s Baby Shower.”) The short answer is they worked with a Boston specialty clinic that found a compatible egg donor and a surrogate willing to bear twins. They each fertilized 10 eggs, and the two most viable were implanted–one from Constantinou’s batch and the other from Lancheros’, so each of the men would be the biological father of one of their children.

Lancheros, 47, is the son of a Colombian mother and Palestinian father. Constantinou, 36, is from Long Island; his mother immigrated from Costa Rica, his father from Cyprus. Together, they form a typical New York City melting-pot family.

The couple met at a speed-dating event in 2001 and have been together ever since. With his easygoing, fluid manner and quick smile, it’s no surprise that Constantinou found success young as a bartender and restaurant manager. Lancheros was reluctant to relinquish his 9-to-5 paycheck, but after a trip to Colombia where they sampled the local cuisine, Constantinou convinced him they ought to follow his dream and open their own restaurant.

Thus was born Bogota Latin Bistro in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on July 5, 2005. The place turned a profit almost immediately and has become one of the most popular, successful Latin-themed eateries in the five boroughs.

Their twins, Gustavo and Milena, were born Nov. 6, 2011, and they were able to attend the birth. “They are a delight–healthy, happy, and they both sleep through the night,” said Constantinou.  “They’re 7 and a half months old and are the most amazing babies–all smiles, they only cry when they’re hungry, they want to be picked up or they’re teething. Yesterday we had a first: Milena cried when we left for work.”

“In light of the fact that we’re both men, our pediatrician said she’s never met two calmer parents,” Lancheros said. “The restaurant is incredible training for that. Stuff happens and you manage, you forge ahead. I’ll tell you what: These two babies are a piece of cake compared to running a restaurant.”

Anyone who questions a gay couple’s suitability to marriage and raising kids need only glimpse Constantinou and Lancheros in action to sense not only the open, energetic, exuberant and humorous approach they take to negotiating the challenges of sustaining a relationship and becoming responsible, loving parents, but also the underlying seriousness and honesty of their commitment to the endeavor. But don’t trust this account; go online and check out Constantinou and Lancheros for yourself in their own words–and smiles.

David Lynch on Clowns

What the hell has David Lynch been doing with his time? He’s produced a number of lo-fi Youtube videos. In 2010 he gave us weather reports. He brewed some coffee and made a 46 second spot, which is just a bunch of flash shots of the bag of coffee, a woman drinking it and the words “Oh Yeah,” displayed in neon letters. He’s commented on the iPhone. He released some ridiculous attempt at a trailer for a possible Duran Duran documentary (sorry Bret Easton Ellis, Lynch beat you to the punch). And he did a Moby music video. Yeah, Moby, the dude with the cue dome and big glasses. His imdb filmography notes a bunch of short films he’s done in the last year, but the last feature he directed, “Inland Empire” came out in 2006… and kind of sucked.
There seem to be a series of actors, directors, writers, etc. who have become so enwrapped with the idea of social media and the sort of cultish aspect of it, that they think they’re somehow re-enforcing a vision they’ve upheld for many years, when all they’re actually doing is killing their own legacy. Lynch. Take a step back. Work on a screenplay. A movie. Return to your roots. Or at least stay away from the recording studio.