The High Line park overlooks the busy Meatpacking District
My summer could end now and I would be happy: I visited The High Line.
Truly the highlight of my summer, the park is located in the fashionable Meatpacking District and opened to the public Tuesday morning after more than a decade of planning. It is sure to become one of the city’s most popular parks, if only because of its unconventional design, and already, people have turned out in droves to see the newest of New York’s green spaces.
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No Comments | Posted on June 26, 2009 | Categories: Attractions, From the Blog, Meatpacking District
tags: free, high line, nature, parks
Shakespeare, in the Park
The green bleacher seats of the Delacorte Theater were wet. It had rained, was raining, and would probably continue to rain. But the whole point of Shakespeare in the Park is that it’s: a) performed outside and b) free. I wiped down my seat with a blanket, put my hood up, and hoped the show would be better than the weather.
It was the second preview performance of Twelfth Night; the show’s official opening night is June 25. The cast has the kind of stars that make theater kids like myself drool over our Playbills: Anne Hathaway (Viola), Audra McDonald (Olivia), Raúl Esparza (Orsino), and a host of talented Public Theater veterans.
The stage is a large, undulating square of grass that looks at though it had been cut out of the Great Lawn and magically manipulated to create hilly levels and flat, green floor. It was the perfect setting for a play that superimposes false nature on real nature, and the rain made it glisten.
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No Comments | Posted on June 23, 2009 | Categories: Attractions, Central Park, Event-Related, From the Blog
tags: Central Park, free, plays, shakespeare in the park, theater
A film screening at the Food Film Festival
High-brow met and mingled with low-brow at the third annual Food Film Festival this year.
Held in both Queens and Manhattan locations, the festival mixes film and food with a simple and cheeky command: watch what you eat. As Festival director Johnny Motz describes it, the audience engages in a “multisensory experience,” where screenings and samplings of delicious food are free. The result is a large and diverse crowd: food snobs mingle with hungry 9-to-5 laboring New Yorkers while families with sobbing babies and restaurant industry folks mill about.
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No Comments | Posted on June 19, 2009 | Categories: Dining, Event-Related, From the Blog
tags: film, film festivals, free, johnny motz, queens, tastings
Artistic chaos at the Draw-A-Thon Theater
With the red curtain pulled aside, I enter into the street-level performance space of the Gershwin Hotel. The room is filled with people, their laps full of drawing pads, canvases, paints, charcoals, and crayons. Their many chairs encircle the following scene: a dozen yelling and shaking art models, hanging off prop-ladders and wallowing in paint-splattered newspaper and odd, handmade props. They’re draped in plaster casts, torn aprons, paper bag diapers, sunglasses, gutted accordions, paint and nothing.
This is Brooklyn artist Michael Alan’s Draw-a-thon Theater and this isn’t your art school’s figure-drawing class.
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3 Comments | Posted on June 19, 2009 | Categories: Event-Related, From the Blog
tags: art, artists, draw-a-thon, models
I was in Union Square when it hit me. They’re everywhere—hipster kids sporting vintage bicycles, BMX riders weaving through the commons, decked-out racers, and all kinds of green-conscious city explorers. Even the busker with the accordion and a cardboard astronaut helmet had his bike parked near by.
Urban bike culture is strong and diverse in New York, from the daily commute to Critical Mass to bike jousting. To celebrate that community and culture there is the annual Bicycle Film Festival, this year from June 17-21.
The Bicycle Film Festival is a multi-city celebration of bicycle through film, art and music. Brendt Barbur, founder and director of the Bicycle Film Festival, is the embodiment of dedication to the bike community. After getting hit by a bus nearly a decade ago while riding his bike in New York City, Barbur was inspired to get political and artistic.
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2 Comments | Posted on June 9, 2009 | Categories: Attractions, Event-Related, From the Blog, Greenwich Village, Union Square
tags: bicycles, bikes, Brendt Barbur, festivals, film, interviews
I’ve never really been much into craft fairs. I find that I wind up seeing the same semiprecious stone necklace at eight different tents. But when I stepped foot into Williamsburg’s McCarren Park for this past weekend’s 5th Annual Renegade Craft Fair—home to the creations of over 300 independent artists in Brooklyn—my eyes were pleasantly met with genuinely special crafts and artwork. This was not your hometown flea market.
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No Comments | Posted on June 8, 2009 | Categories: Event-Related, From the Blog, Williamsburg
tags: brooklyn, crafts, fair, jewelry, Williamsburg
The CupcakeStop truck on its first day
Food trucks have long been driving the streets of New York City. With a history started decades ago by ice cream trucks and continuing into the present day with taco trucks, coffee trucks, and waffle trucks, these mobile vendors have a new colleague among their ranks—the cupcake truck, CupcakeStop.
On the corner of West 14th Street and Fifth Avenue this past Wednesday, a white van decorated in cartoon cupcakes topped with white icing waited patiently for 10 a.m. to arrive. Curious passers-by stopped in at the crowded serving-window and picked up postcard-sized flyers that read “NYC’s First Mobile Gourmet Cupcake Shoppe Has Arrived!” In less than 10 minutes, this growing line of sweet toothed New Yorkers became the first 500 people to receive free gourmet mini-cupcakes from CupcakeStop.
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1 Comment | Posted on June 5, 2009 | Categories: Dining, From the Blog, Greenwich Village, Manhattan
tags: cupcakes, dessert, Food, food trucks, guilty pleasures
The Greenwich Treehouse
Few happy hours actually seem to be all that “happy.” A dollar off here and a few free wings there can leave you satisfied, but “happy” doesn’t quite capture the feeling. The Happy Hour on Thursdays at Greenwich Treehouse in the West Village is the exception, though. When I heard the bar offers $1 Guinness, Blue Moon, and Stella Artois during that hour, I was happy to say the least—more like shocked and incredibly joyful.
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1 Comment | Posted on June 4, 2009 | Categories: From the Blog, Greenwich Village, Nightlife
tags: bargains, bars, beer, booze, happy hour
F. Murray Abraham and Daniel London star in Ethan Coen's Offices
Paranoia, suspicion, alienation, terror, and torment—this is the world of the office. And playwright Ethan Coen (Oscar-winner for No Country For Old Men and Fargo) fearlessly plumbs the depths of this cubicle culture in the hilarious off-Broadway production, Offices.
The show is a triptych of blisteringly funny one-act plays; the whole performance clocks in at 90 minutes. Each story bounces through a series of brisk and brutal episodes, in which Coen’s characters bluster their way through water cooler power struggles, go to pieces over end-of-the-quarter anxieties, and ultimately, with something of a wink from an author setting down his misanthropy for a moment, find release and redemption.
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1 Comment | Posted on June 3, 2009 | Categories: Attractions, Chelsea, Event-Related, From the Blog, Nightlife
tags: off-broadway, reviews, Sam Reisman, student rush, theater
It's not easy commuting to school
As a native New Yorker I find it appropriate to use the word “schlepp”. As a nomadic college student who occasionally lives in Brooklyn—or should I say, lives anywhere with a roof and four walls—I find it is more than appropriate. It is mandatory.
In the last week I have found myself schlepping all over New York. Early in the spring I decided to save my family some money and stay at my dad’s brownstone in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood instead of paying for Columbia housing.
Brilliant idea! I told myself, but traveling the hour-plus train ride from Bed-Stuy to Columbia more than four times a week to and from work has proven to be less than genius. Though it’s true that one experiences a certain level of, shall we say, excitement while riding back to Brooklyn between midnight and 4 a.m., I can live without that thrill.
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3 Comments | Posted on June 2, 2009 | Categories: From the Blog, Manhattan, Morningside Heights
tags: brooklyn, commuting, housing, living, travel
