Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward--step aside. We've got John Wallowitch, composer and cabaret performer extraordinaire. And in this wonderful cd, he sings his songs of love for the greatest city in the world.
"While Noel Coward is no longer around to set the standards for a certain kind of sophisticated songwriting sensibility, John Wallowitch nimbly carries the torch."--Stephen Holden, NY Times
Available at: moss
I stopped in at Marianne Boesky to pick up a copy of This, the new magazine of artists' writings, then swung by Charlie Cowles Gallery for a show of paintings that resemble Fabergé eggs by my old gallery partner Melinda Hackett. James Surls, showing in the front room, chatted up a youthful looking Barbara Rose, in bleached blonde hair and pastel schmatta. Surls' sculptures on Park Avenue near Lever House are burnished blue pinwheels of special majesty.
303 Gallery advertised a new show of photographs by Stephen Shore, but, once inside the gallery, it was Shore's teenage photos of Andy, Edie, Chuck Wein and the rest of the Factory crowd, adorning the walls. It’s a sign of desperation when all that will sell is the patina of Andy. Thinking of the Velvet Underground music blasting through Richard L. Feigen & Co.’s Ray Johnson show,, now on view uptown, I thought, "The ‘60s won't save us, it's as if, back then, we walked around humming Stephen Foster songs and mourning the end of slavery."
I hopped a cab to Baby Grand, the new karaoke bar on Grand and Lafayette, which has a small gallery in the front showing photos by Christopher Dawson, who was a hit at Knoedler & Co. last summer. Dawson specializes in snapping the scenes outside famous trials. He was having a beer in the bar and told me, "Trials are thin on the ground, Charlie. My next gig is the Madoff sentencing." Friends tell me that they have spotted Bernie on Shelter Island, where the Feds may have him relaxing and ratting on his hedge fund pals, but the mainstream press still has the crook of the century locked up in the MCC downtown.
Friends aging gracefully, artist-produced books, nostalgic shows and me emptying Baby Grand by warbling MacArthur Park. Someone left the cake out in the rain.
Called Yazoo in England—and Yaz over here—Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet were a duo only from 1982 to 1983, just enough time for them to score three dance hits (“Don’t Go,” “Situation,” and “Nobody’s Diary”) that, by themselves, justify the existence of Eighties Nights. Clarke played the music, Moyet sang, and the two evidently said very little to each other when they were a band. Just as he had been during his brief time in Depeche Mode, Clarke was the slight, androgynous boy in the back, rarely looking up. Moyet was the husky-voiced singer who dominated the whole enterprise, making her gender simultaneously irrelevant and the point of every song. While Clarke’s tracks were models of efficient digital pop, Moyet was gloriously human, singing in the tradition of overwhelming dance divas like Gloria Gaynor and Patti LaBelle. When the band arrives in New York for reunion shows this week at Terminal 5 and the Beacon Theatre, expect equal amounts of frat and fierce on the dance floor.
link: "Just Say Yaz"
By Sasha Frere-Jones ~ The New Yorker Magazine
So, Florent. Just to recap: We learned back in, oh, January that Florent was going to close its storied doors. The landlord, Joanne Lucas, put the space on the block for something like $58,000 or maybe even $70,000 a month. Florent Morellet had been paying around $6,000 — clearly, Lucas wasn't looking for a new diner to move into her space. For that kind of money, Lucas was clearly looking for the kind of tenant that is synonymous with the meatpacking district's latest incarnation: a high-end retailer, perhaps the sort of chic, Euro-friendly designer or boutique that would willingly bleed that sort of money just to sit on a cobblestone corner near Soho House.
But, as we all now know, Lucas didn't get that high-end retailer as a tenant. She didn't get any tenant, it would seem, as it has been reported that after Florent shuts its doors for good on Sunday night, Lucas will reopen the joint on Tuesday as R&L Restaurant, the diner that Florent replaced many years ago (and which was once owned by Lucas's father). Even better, R&L will have the same staff and menu as Florent. So besides a name change and the removal of a quaint neon sign, we're guessing the only real, quantifiable difference will be the absence of the inimitable Mr. Morellet. And that's a big difference, of course — but still, we can't help feeling a little duped here.
read more here
Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived.
Centered on a handful of late-1970s downtown groups like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and James Chance’s Contortions, it was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.
But every weird rock scene — and every era of New York bohemia — eventually gets its coffee-table book moment. This month Abrams Image is publishing “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.
The book will be celebrated with an exhibition opening at KS Art, at 73 Leonard Street in TriBeCa. With crisp black-and-white photographs and interviews with musicians and visual artists, the book is a loving reminiscence of a largely unheard period, as well as a look at a seedy, pre-gentrified Lower East Side. Most groups in the no wave scene — which also included Mars, the Theoretical Girls and the Gynecologists — left behind few recordings, and the compilation album that defined the genre, “No New York,” produced by Brian Eno in 1978, has never been legitimately issued on CD in the United States.
link: A Brief, Noisy Moment That Still Reverberates By Ben Sisario, The New York Times
Even the faithful will admit it: hip-hop may not be dead, but it needs a jump start. There are fewer exciting voices, and production has stalled. So what comes next? A different crop of producers? A freaky new sound? Both of these things are being provided by a loose affiliation of musicians in California, Montreal, and Glasgow.
With backgrounds in rock, electronica, dancehall, and hip-hop, they’ve wandered into a similar sound. (I call the genre “lazer bass.”) Menacing, bass-heavy productions with layers of electronic noise are laid under existing hip-hop vocals. My favorite artists in this coalition are a Montreal duo called Megasoid. I saw them play in Montreal in a small loft above a restaurant. Though the crowd chose schmoozing over dancing, Megasoid bobbed and laughed through their own set. The duo perform here on May 2 at the Low End Theory, a party started in Los Angeles and now being imported to the Knitting Factory on a monthly basis. Whether lazer bass affects hip-hop or simply exists as a brief, happy splinter, it is as good as dance music gets.
link: SET TO STUN by Sasha Frere-Jones The New Yorker Magazine
(my illustration above)
one piece is one year old today!
The reigning downtown It party known as Misshapes came to a neon-tinged end early Sunday morning.
In line the kids passed their time smoking, checking one another out and eating free ice cream. Mark Hunter, the party photographer better known as the Cobrasnake, bopped around snapping photos of people. Mr. Tatreau-Sherwood had a broken foot, but that did not hinder his style. Decked out in shorts and a bow tie, he had sheathed his crutches in gold lamé, made from a pair of American Apparel leggings snipped in half. Ms. Lezark, who has become a designer muse with mentions in Vogue, teetered around in an expensive-looking black frock and shiny gray booties.
“They came to New York and they set it ablaze,” Jimmy Webb, 50, the wiry manager of the East Village punk boutique Trash and Vaudeville, said of the trio. “I was around for the Studio 54 days, and this is the only thing that ever matched it.”
Inside the club the dance floor was never less than packed. Fed by a soundtrack of almost-new music (Bloc Party, Arcade Fire) and retro kitsch (Cher, “All I Want for Christmas”), the dancing crowd made full use of the stage, the tables, the banquettes and a stripper pole. In the D.J. booth, which the party’s founders often outsource to celebrities, the model Agyness Deyn took a turn, alongside other regulars like Spencer Product and the apprentice Misshape, Jackson Pollis. Judging by the scene ’80s spandex and ’90s stripes are hot (again) and marching-band uniforms are the new new thing.
Appropriately enough for a crowd hung up on the fashions and music of the past, the nostalgizing began almost immediately.
“It’s the end of an era, darling,” said Jonny Makeup, a devotee who will be writing a blog on a new online magazine at misshapes.com.
But since a central tenet of hipsterism is an avowed disdain for all things hipster, and since half the fun of Misshapes has always been making fun of Misshapes, some people were ready for the denouement. Jeremy Lipkin, a short-shorts-wearing art director from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and two of his friends left before midnight. “We’re all adults here,” Mr. Lipkin, 23, said. “It’s time to move on.”
For their part the Misshapes crew also seemed prepared to say good-bye. Though the three founders have become fashion and media darlings, their party has suffered a backlash. Sleep, Mr. Nicol said, is newly appealing.
The lights at this one went on at 4 a.m., but the kids kept dancing, cheering and waving their arms. Mr. Meriam snapped more photos. For a few moments, the prevailing feeling was sincere, overwhelming fun.
The final song was “Disco 2000,” recorded by Pulp. From the D.J. booth Mr. Pollis sprayed the crowd with water. The Misshapes hugged; Ms. Lezark smiled.
Nearby a man in pegged jeans, pointy brown ankle boots and an oversize jersey vest looked forlorn. “Misshapes is so over,” he said, and sighed.
Link: "The Last Night of Misshapes: Hip, Post-New-Wave and Through" By MELENA RYZIK, The New York Times
