With shades of theme park artificiality and cheeky, faux-nostalgic imagineering (I’d guess that the majority of young LES urbanites who make it here have never spent an evening at a drive-in theater), Grand Opening has installed a 1965 Ford Falcon convertible and a movie screen in its small Lower East Side space, and is charging $75 per private screening.

This is so awesome.

What you have to appreciate is how an atavistic expression of post-war, car-crazy rural Americana is incorporated into the knowing (and winking), urban belly of downtown Manhattan, and the way in which the private-in-public principle of the erstwhile drive-in itself (one in which the audience enjoyed the communal and outdoor spectacle of a movie while sitting inside their separate and insular aluminum cocoons) has been détourned once again; “public viewing” is really a private experience after all.

I can only hope that there’s a breeze machine and some glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

[via Racked]

In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

From illustrator Thomas Fuchs’ collection “GOP100 - Deconstructing Dumbo,” produced around the time the Republican Convention invaded our fair city of New York in that depressing summer of 2004.

It’s now part of a self-published book; get your copy at New York Imposter.

[via Neatorama]

For those Overheard In New York-obsessives, add a spatial fever to your flavor …

Here is Overplot, a clever Overheard in New York / Google Maps mashup. Arguably, the best Google Maps mashup out there …

[via Curbed]

In response to dipshit Chertoff and the Dept. of Homeland Security’s decision to cut NYC’s counterterrorism funding by half, citing, among other reasons, that New York has no landmarks worth protecting, Hillary Clinton (and subsequently, the New York Post) has started a NY postcard writing campaign …

Send Chertoff a postcard of the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, or the Empire State Building. Ha!

Raise a Bronx cheer from here and here.

***

Speaking of New York postcards, here’s a blast from the past (our old web project, 23¢ Stories, still alive and kicking)

A beautiful Flickr set of HDR (high dynamic range) -processed photographs of, or taken in, New York City. The images taken from off the top of the Empire State Building look almost Biblical!

[via Gothamist]

Two pieces in today’s Times …

This discusses the green building movement in New York, and features SOM’s recently completed 7 World Trade Center, and Sir Norman Foster’s Hearst Building. When they say ‘green,’ they mean it in more senses than one:

Of course, it isn’t just environmental consciousness that is motivating developers. Because green buildings use from 30 to 70 percent less energy, they can be run for less money — but leased for more, because companies want healthy offices, which several studies have shown lead to increased productivity.

This op-ed by Jamie Lincoln Kitman of Automobile Magazine applies some lucidity to the hype surrounding hybrid cars:

Several bills floating around Congress, for instance, have proposed tax incentives to buyers of hybrid cars, irrespective of their gas mileage. Thus, under one failed but sure to resurface formulation, the suburbanite who buys a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source would be entitled to a huge tax incentive, while the buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that delivers 40 miles per gallon on the open road gets none.

And under some imaginable patchwork of state and local ordinances, the Durango buyer might get a special parking space at the train station and the right to use a high occupancy vehicle lane, despite appalling fuel economy and a car full of empty seats, while the Honda driver will have to walk to the train from a distant parking lot after braving the worst of morning rush hour traffic on the highway just like everybody else.

*** 

Holy hyperlinking! While we are discussing the Times, I was pleasantly surprised when I saved the above article and received this smart, Amazon-style followup — a long-overdue feature, for sure:

I generally try to avoid reading movie reviews before I see the movie in question, but anticipation of the release of Block Party, a documentary involving two of my favorite artist/entertainers, comedian Dave Chappelle and director Michel Gondry, became overwhelming, and so I indulged in a little bit of pregnostication.

I first read Stephanie Zacharek’s piece in Salon, and it seemed to me a little overcooked. A sample quote:

While the rest of us are busy carving up the country — red state, blue state; urban, suburban; sophisticated, rustic; them, us — in ‘Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,’ there’s room for only one America, but it’s one big enough to include everybody.

While I love Salon, and have nothing but disdain and contempt for the state of our politics in 2006, I have been somewhat saddened by the heavily politicized air the webzine has taken on since its more genteel, arts and literary editorial origins in the late 90s. Salon is fighting the good fight, but I miss the frivolous decadence of, say, its ’Masterpiece’ series, one of which elaborated on Seinfeld as ’one of the most complex and troubling art works of our time.’ Sigh …

The mention of the insidious and tired red state / blue state trope in Zacharek’s review seemed unwelcome, jarring, limp-wristed, a little too simplistically and cloyingly topical. But it’s a sign of how the malady of the times has infected and desensitized us all that I only became simpatico with Zacharek while watching the film, thinking: Jesus, what a lovely, beautiful, joyous, exuberant movie … With belated clarity came the realization that it wasn’t that Zacharek was placing the film within a ‘red/blue’ framework (the mention of which must have triggered some kind of involuntary gag response in me), but that she was arguing precisely the opposite; that historicized frames simply cannot contain the bursting spirit and abundant soulfulness of this film.

 

I spent my Friday off roaming the streets of the city and the hallways of the Met and the Museum of Natural History.

The Met is currently showcasing a collection of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines,’ the name for his mixed media, half-painted, half-sculptural works. I was already enamored with Rauschenberg’s messy, layered, collage sensibility (I throw Tapies, DeKoonig, and Basquiat into this camp as well, but Rauschenberg was probably there first), but to see physical objects — furniture, window frames, clothing, ladders, electrical fixtures, and stuffed animals, including an alpaca goat with a tire hooped around it! — extend out of the picture frame into your physical viewing space was very satisfying in a real, visceral way.

There is also something satisfying by their utter lack of pretension, too. If Marcel Duchamp’s dull, ordinary, mass-produced ‘found objects’ were meant to puncture the sanctimony of High Art, they still did so by taking on themselves the articulation of that polemic — the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the wine rack, provide a semiotic purpose, and are therefore still slaves to a concept; they are still ideas. Rauschenberg’s found objects, on the other hand, are much humbler. They are comfortable amidst the paint smudges and their own ugly, scattered imperfections. They lack any sense of self-consciousness, they don’t raise their voices …

In a distant room in the museum, much smaller in size and more compact in presentation, was a small exhibit of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s sculptural and architectural projects, its emphasis on the relationship between the two.

Ok, I begrudge Calatrava (trained as both an architect and an engineer) the precision and elegance of his sculptures; every piece is a system of tension (wires) and mass / compression (solid material, usually ebony or bronze) held static in an equipoise of competing forces. His buildings and his bridges also share that kind of structural rigor, and they too are beautiful to behold. But when extrapolated to the scale of architectural, the beauty of Calatrava’s formalism turns tyrannical. We can all tiptoe around his sculptures and admire them at a distance in the controlled space of a museum (no cameras please!), but architecture is a larger, more complex, messier, interactive affair — it contains a vitality and dynamism that fights against Calatrava’s rigidity. This conflict is especially apparent given the fact that several of his recent commissions seem to be massive transportation hubs (including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub under construction in Lower Manhattan), whose urbanity and bustle seem completely at odds with their stately, quasi-religious designs. Now if he were designing cathedrals or libraries or something of the like, then perhaps I would be onboard …

I can no longer remember which professor/architect said this at one of our undergraduate studio reviews, but the critique, over a student’s spartan, hyper-symmetrical, super-minimalist, ultimately prison-like design, went something like, ‘Now tell me. What about the Coke machine? If you have to put one in here, and you will, where would you put it? Where can you put it?’

The final, and as it turned out, the longest, leg of my day was across the park at the Museum of Natural History, which was mounting an exhibit on Charles Darwin, founder of Evolution. I went primarily as a show of support and solidarity for fellow reason-based, humanist souls, in light of the shitstorm brewing these days over the teaching of Intelligent Design in American public schools. My $20 was meant mainly to say, ‘Thank you for putting on this show at this particular point in time, and fighting the good fight against the forces of ignorance,’ but it ended up paying for much more than mere lip-service.

The show is incredibly well-executed. The displays (which contain a lot of text — those who don’t like to stand and read be warned) are arranged chronologically, with a strong sense of pacing and narrative. The story begins with Darwin’s curious, insect-collecting boyhood, and progresses through his college days; his 5 years traveling the world and collecting exotic specimens (and eating them! ha!) aboard the HMS Beagle; his return to London and his subsequent entry into its scientific intelligentsia; his move, with his new family, to his manor in the English countryside, where the germination and methodical development of his Evolutionary theory began in earnest; and up through, finally, the publication of The Origin of Species, and the subsequent storm of controversy that it generated — and eventually triumped over. As any well told story does, it envelopes you so completely. And it is also successful because it not only presents the scientific history intelligently and rigorously, but situates the ideas in the rich, emotional life of Darwin the man.

The rebuke of Creationism (and its insidious proxy, Intelligent Design) comes at the very end, but the argument is made persuasively, not angrily. Which meant the show has a good political sense, too, by making politics invisible. This is was perhaps the only museum exhibition I’ve ever left with the urge to applaud outloud.

Now my question is: could anybody over at the Discovery Institute mount something as smart and coherent as this without some kind of divine intervention?

 

Snap! Wish I had thought of this! And then, I wish I had the balls to follow through! Very jealous. Especially over the fact that during the Big Blizzard I was stuck in front of Photoshop, preparing for a deadline, instead of romping in the 26.9″ deep snow.

Some kids sneak up on the Highline after the snowstorm …

[via Gothamist]

 

The Guardian has a terrific, rather literary piece from 2002 about Mark Rothko’s presitigious late-career commission for murals in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. It was a commission he himself scotched, giving his paintings instead to the Tate in London.

There is much psychobabble here about Rothko’s vengeful artistic temperament, and the elite social and cultural scene of late 50s New York — centered in the Four Seasons, in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building – on which he wanted to inflict it, as well as some discussion of Michelangelo’s vestibule to the Laurentian Library in Florence, whose spatial derangement served as Rothko’s muse.

[from BoingBoing via Things Magazine]

 

This was one of the most powerful snowstorms to hit NYC in recorded history, with 20 inches of accumulation. At one point it was snowing at a rate of 3 inches per hour! As you can see above, even now about 24 hours into it, the world is still a swirling white blur outside our window …

Some additional pictures under the ‘nyc blizzard’ tag in flickr.

[addendum: This turned out to be one for the record books! Central Park recorded 26.9" of snow -- a record for snowfall here! It beat the 1947 record of 26.4". The storm was so fierce, 'thundersnow' was reported in the early hours of Sunday. Thundersnow!]

A profile of Bob Greenberg and R/GA (which happens to be my current bread and butter).

The article lives here.

 

I checked out the Cut & Paste! event last weekend, a live Painting/DJ event at the Supper Club near Times Square. Tristan Eaton, Travis Millard and Patrick Rocha did the painting, and Spinna, Rich Medina, and Tyler Askew provided the beats (which was mostly funk and hip hop). Both of these aspects were great, but it was the crowd that was lacking, a mostly rasian mish-mash representin’ the NYU Future I-Bankers of America. Ugh. Reinforced my general reticence about going out in NYC on Saturday Night anymore. And why, when it comes down to it, if you have to stand in line and pay cover (we did — it was 15 bones. Ouch!), it will be mostly suckers who will bite.

Ok, I’m a hater about bad crowds. But I could have stayed all night to watch the painting … An in-progress video is here. And you can find the final outcome below …

 

Big props to Meredith and Cindy for their robotic work in the Les Freres Corbusier production of Heddatron! The Sunday Times has written a terrific article about it, complete with one of those flash audio slideshow deals. Hells yeah!

There were earlier Wired and Time Out New York pieces about the play as well. But unless they include flash fade-ins and volume-controllable audio, they shall be relegated to second billing status.

Meredith and Cindy, for those that don’t know, are the brains behind the Botmatrix, and they bring us closer every day to the Singularity.

 

I went to see a lovely little exhibition at the Japan Society last week which the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto curated, called History of History.

I first came across Sugimoto’s photographs at the ICA in London almost 10 years ago. What really struck me then was his work’s conceptual elegance; for one series, Sugimoto took his camera into old school movie theater palaces and in a single, super-long exposure, photographed the entire run of a movie in one frame. The glowing screen in his shots became a palimpsest; a static distillation of a much larger span of time and vision. In another series, Sugimoto traveled to coastlines all over the world and photographed the horizon line at each one. Every image in the series is compositionally identical — the sky and the water are evenly split across the middle of each frame — but the aesthetic variation between them is unexpectedly wide. Light, humidity levels, wind conditions, temperature, sea composition affected the images, blurring the horizon line, changing the color and texture of the water, opening up a range of emotional responses in the viewer, from a foreboding to pleasant excitement to a sense of deep calm. There is some sort of inversion is taking place here, a blending of the romantic sublime with eastern minimalism. But whereas both had reductive aims — the sublime was about capturing the terrifying grandeur of nature on a canvas, and minimalism was concerned with rendering formal and material essences — Sugimoto’s sea photographs begin with a given, seemingly plain proposition — the simple meeting of the atmosphere with a large body of water — and expands on the variational infinitude of that encounter.

The exhibit only had a few of his photographs, and was comprised instead mainly of curated ‘objects’ — scrolls, textiles, masks, but also fossils and ancient tools — Sugimoto’s intention is probably intentionally slippery, but what I understood was that he juxtaposes natural and man-made (and occasionally ‘art-historical’) objects in order to illustrate parallel evolutions of matter through time. And to show how ultimately he is agnostic to the question of whether it’s the timeless or the artificial that exerts a greater influence on his work.

As a side-note, I picked up this monograph of Sugimoto’s work (which I believe the Hirshorn in D.C. printed) at the MoMA Bookstore a few months ago. It is more expensive but the quality of the reproductions is superior to that of many photography monographs which MoMA puts out, which, imho, are generally cruddy, dotty garbage.

 

To coincide with the worldwide release of the Air Max 360, Nike has opened up the 7 previous (so-called ‘Classic’) Maxes to iD, where they are now customizable via the feature we designed (at my dayjob at R/GA). The possibilities for cross-pollination and outright genetic manipulation are dizzying. Check out the feature here.

Together with the even more esoteric Max ‘Three Decades of Cushioning’ colorways that launched last week (Freshnessmag has a compendium of the available kicks at iD Studio 255 in Nolita here), I believe we will be seeing inspired Maxes all over the place in downtown Manhattan and ‘Crooks in the upcoming months.

Meredith and I have been trying to eat at a ‘fancy’ restaurant every month in order to exercise our palates as well as our growing bourgeois tendencies. For the month of January we went straight to the top of the heap, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, one of four NYC restaurants that got three stars from Michelin.

For the winter season the restaurant was offering a veritable blowout de truffles (six courses revolving around the lovable fun guy), which they named their ‘Tuber Melanosporum Menu,’ which to my admittedly tin ear, did not exactly inflame the appetite (although it did have a certain cerebral appeal). We went with the à la carte option. The breakdown as follows:

• Appetizer: Butternut squash ravioli, celery ‘moustarda di cremona’, sage emulsion. The emulsion reminded me of that frothy lather that builds at the top of a root beer float — this being the three-star version of that froth.
• Fish: Cobia, sautéed edamame, kohlrabi and hearts of palm, peppermint broth. It was the peppermint that drew me in initially, but truthfully it was hard to detect. Cobia was great, a first for me, a dense, mild white fish (as though you crossed salmon or tuna with cod). The vegetable sides were a fresh, firm and springy accompaniment.
• Meat: Blue foot chicken, rainbow Swiss chard, black truffles, cooking jus. We veered into truffle territory with the main course, and there is nothing more superlative to say about this dish than that it was utterly tuberific.
• Dessert: Gianduja ’sablé’, chocolate, orange granite, marmelade/sauce. I simply could not finish this, but before abandoning it I admit to nibbling off all the gold foil.

I’d like to add that there were several exceptional in-between fillers, like a sophisticated cheesy poof we were told to pop in our mouths whole; a cod in a white wine cream sauce with a pearl onion, potato, and capers; some type of amazing biscuit bread (it made me completely ignore the baguettes, which I am now sure would have been just as delicious); an ice cream served in a silver chalice, which issued a musical chime whenever you tapped it with your silver spoon; a rolling cart of after-dinner candy; and finally, at coat pickup, a complementary kiddie bag of pastries for the morning after. After this they had to roll us down 57th Street and up into a cab Katamari-style in order to get us home.

The space was Pop-Continental all the way — gold lamé trim on top of pseudo-neoclassical columns, which is par for the course (not as elegant and plain-spoken as the interiors of Daniel, but not as stark-naked wack as the erstwhile Liberace-inspired V Steakhouse), although I did not care for the brass instruments embedded in the walls and splattered with paint. That toed the line of bon goût for me.

Service was impeccable of course; the round-robin routine of different waiters and drink servers and plate-takers and silverware-setters was like shiatsu from twenty different hands, cocooning you within a well-pampered, stupefied state of tabletop order, inner well-being, and gastric fullness.

It was a thoroughly pleasurable experience. Although: will it ever be possible to be waited on by well-dressed men with heavy french accents and not feel judged?