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You are currently browsing stories tagged with Art and Performance

Lost In Transit

by 03/17/2012
Neighborhood: All Over

It was 5PM on a Friday evening and somehow I was the only person on the train. I may have put the “new” in “New Yorker,” but I was no stranger to the stuffy sardine cans that subway trains turn into during rush hour. I craned my neck to get a look into the adjoining [...]

Bento Box Bingo

by 02/26/2012
Neighborhood: Featured, Lower East Side

Many things are curated in this day and age. Google will happily refer you to “a curated book,” “curated digital apps,” “a curated list of televised soccer games,” a “meticulously curated” fixed-gear bicycle boutique in Paris, and “a curated set of grooming products.” A curated door, such as can be found at 27 Ludlow Street [...]

Looking For Lady Gaga

by 01/04/2012
Neighborhood: Featured, Midtown

A Barney's window display of Lady Gaga's work has legendary multi-media performance artist Colette's notorious creations written all over it. Colette, whose seminal performance art and multi-media installations originated out of New York City's vibrant art scene in the 1970's has traveled to museums and galleries all over the world; including the Guggenheim; MOMA; and [...]

Talking Back: My First Encounter with the Human Microphone

by 12/31/2011
Neighborhood: Financial District, Uncategorized

I first visited Occupy Wall Street on a chilly evening in the middle of October. A few hundred people were gathered near the eastern steps of Zuccotti Park for the nightly meeting of the General Assembly. On the steps a young man was shrieking inaudibly. A few yards away, a jackhammer was being applied to [...]

Chola’s Habit

by 11/16/2011
Neighborhood: Featured, Williamsburg

My younger sister, Chola, a second grader at Our Lady of Good Counsel, is chosen for a special part in the school play. My sister is real cute and the Sisters adore her. Chola loves Sister Romona and gave her a candy necklace for Christmas. She helps Sister Romona erase the blackboard every day and [...]

A Requiem for Secondhand Books

by 07/01/2011
Neighborhood: Greenwich Village, West Village

She: I want to buy you a good book for your birthday. He: What would I do with a book? Buy me a new body! --Conversation overheard between a man and a woman. When I think of second-hand books, I think quite literally of anonymous fingers reaching out to me from beyond the grave. I [...]

Undone. A Moving Story.

by 05/22/2011
Neighborhood: All Over, Park Slope, Upper West Side

In graduate school, I dated a skinny fiction writer named Dan. It was a good relationship at the time, always having someone willing to read your draft of this or that, but when the time came to move from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn, I needed less brains, more brawn, and that’s exactly what [...]

Lies My Canvasser Told Me

by 05/01/2011
Neighborhood: Herald Square, Uncategorized

I support a poor kid whose name I don’t know in a country I don’t remember the name of, somewhere in South America, I think. This happened because I was stopped on the street on my way to meet a friend for dinner at a nice restaurant, singled out from the after-work stream of people [...]

Baby Through the Looking Glass

by 04/11/2011
Neighborhood: Lower East Side, Uncategorized

On a brisk bright February afternoon, father and baby daughter entered the Sunshine Theater on Houston Street. A planned Cobble Hill Cinemas screening of Duck Soup the month before had been canceled due to a single-digit temperature (sorry Groucho, Daddy really wanted it), so this was to be the four-month-old infant’s maiden moviegoing voyage. The [...]

Courting Coincidence

by 03/13/2011
Neighborhood: Morningside Heights, Uncategorized

With amorous eyes I looked forward to the summer of 1976. Not long out of law school, I had just landed a job with a landlord/tenant law firm in lower Manhattan, and had rented a beach house on Fire Island for the season. I was dating a girl named Elizabeth, and though we had not [...]

Don’t Cry for Me

by 02/07/2011
Neighborhood: Prospect Heights

I was standing at the platform waiting for the Q Train in the deep underbelly of the Atlantic Avenue station. I shouldn’t have been there. It was a Sunday afternoon and if everything had gone according to plan, I should have already reached Prospect Heights off the 3 train, if only the trains were running [...]

Beat It!

by 01/30/2011
Neighborhood: Queens

On the middle level of the ever moving station stop at Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, where the subway and the elevated meet in a shaky embrace and humanity flows on a non-stop escalator between heaven and earth, the melting pot boils over with new arrivals as trains disgorge their loads. Here reed-flute players from the [...]