Granola Politics Turned Cornball

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Redford film misremembers 60s radicals Ten years ago, a documentary titled The Weather Underground opened at Film Forum and inadvertently exposed the follies of romanticizing the radical student movement of the 1960s. Now Robert Redford presents his own romantic version in The Company You Keep. It’s an old-timer’s look at the movement’s faults when an
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Back of the Bus, Top of the Heap

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Michel Gondry’s latest ingenuity may be the best teen flick ever At first Michel Gondry’s The We and the I is charming and then it’s scary. It starts with a delightfully, deliberately crude F/X of a boom box style city bus traversing the rough streets of The Bronx–a toy-like transformation that gets smashed into realism:
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Eye on Auctions

Written by NYPress on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Photos and Fine Books loom large  By Caroline Birenbaum A spate of auctions cluster around the annual AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) Show, April 4-7 (aipad.com), and the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, April 11-14 (nyantiquarianbookfair.com), both at the Park Avenue Armory. The upcoming auction previews showcase rare works from a number of
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Wearable Art

Written by Marsha McCreadie on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Impressionists, Fashion and Modernity at the Met A big show founded on a simple idea, “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” is like taking a gander at the walk-in closet of some very elegant people, only they’re expecting you. The dresses, also a few men’s frock coats, are there, as well as hats, corsets, even dressing table
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Sojourner Snoop

Written by NYPress on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, West Side Spirit

A hip-hop icon’s chronicle of reincarnated rap culture By Elena Oumano Rapper Snoop Dogg’s not the first African-American musician to be smitten by reggae culture. For the most part, though, Black American traditions, both religious and musical, are too entrenched and compelling themselves to cede to Haile Selassie worship over the one drop riddim. Still,
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Out-loud Outlaw

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

P.J. Hogan’s Mental offers a compassionate screwball masterpiece P.J. Hogan, Australia’s most appealing yet least heralded filmmaker, returns to prominence with Mental, a kind of musical screwball comedy about social misfits that at first seems perfectly designed for the era of “It Gets Better” nostrums. But Hogan is bolder than the politically correct pandering of
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Return of the Poet

Written by NYPress on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Langston Hughes’ “Ask Your Mama” gets a one night only revival By Valerie Gladstone Emmy-award winning composer, Laura Karpman, started thinking about staging Langston Hughes’ twelve-part, epic poem, “Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz” when she came across it in a bookstore six years ago. Begun by the great poet in 1960 while attending
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Locked Inside the Kubrick Cult

Written by Armond White on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

the-shining-maze Room 237 lets nerds shine Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect
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Loot of the World

Written by NYPress on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, Uncategorized, West Side Spirit

Fate of Detroit’s premier art museum serves warning to the nation By Emma Lockridge The collective spirit of financially beleaguered Detroiters mirrors a declaration from Celie in The Color Purple: “I’m poor, black, my situation is ugly, but God, I’m still here.” While the people stay put in Motown, will the city’s art museum survive
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Eye on Auctions

Written by NYPress on . Posted in Arts our town, Arts our town downtown, Arts west side spirit, Our Town, Our Town Downtown, West Side Spirit

Asian Week Wonders By Caroline Birenbaum New York auction houses present an astounding variety of top-quality items from India, Tibet, Japan and China during mid-March “Asia Week.” From archaic bronze vessels to modern Indian paintings, there is much to see in the preview exhibitions that begin March 15. Check the websites for details, blogs and
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