You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Art and Performance.”
The old upright piano was in the living room from my earliest recollection until the day my father died. He must have brought it sometime in the early ‘50s, soon after he'd gotten married. Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song called “Two Guitars” and [...]
Sometimes I sit in the lunchroom of the Guggenheim Museum and write. If I can, I sit at the rear wall, where there are many framed black and white photographs of the museum’s benefactors, artists, and scenes of the museum’s construction. A bearded Brancusi sits with his dog; they resemble one another, both smiling. Thomas Messer, the museum’s first director, [...]
Some people take their High School Senior Superlatives a bit too seriously. No, I’m not talking about Mary, my class’s “Worst Driver,” devoting her life to turning over a new leaf as a professional chauffer. I’m talking about my very own "Class Clown" award spurring my standup comedy career. Ever since my first time performing comedy at age 18--shortly after [...]
He was puckish and presumptuous, impudent and ebullient; a bantam and bumptious, dastardly and delirious hand-out seeking hotdogger with a bare head, bushy beard, and bushels of personality. On many nights he could be found fast asleep on a bench in Washington Square Park, his belly careening with gin and ale that he had bamboozled tourists into buying him. Born [...]
I don’t know what I’m doing here. It is a Thursday night and I am in a tiny Lower East Side theater at a dress rehearsal for the play I’m in where I am going to take all my clothes off. Now, generally, I don’t act and do not, by any means, take all my clothes off. This is how [...]
After work on Tuesdays, my mother comes home to the apartment in the Ansonia Hotel where we live with my grandmother and takes me to acting class. The year is 1952. I hate acting class even worse than I hate second grade! My mother says I will learn how to speak with “charm and grace.” But she doesn’t fool me. [...]
I was temping at a law firm, stocking the goodies that helped lawyers get through their miserably long days. My supervisor told me to be peppy when I brought them their Diet Cokes and cappuccinos, their Toblerones, Mrs. Field’s and macadamia nuts. But peppiness not being my forte, I performed my duties sullenly, and often snuck off to kick back [...]
Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? --William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and brawny, toying with the tail [...]
In the hiatus between semesters during my years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I often decamped to New York City, ostensibly to find a job during the break, but really an inducement to be somewhere—anywhere—else. One hot summer day while plodding along the sidewalk of MacDougal Street south of Bleecker, I noticed the open door of [...]
In the gallery, I saw a woman on video shave her pubic hair and later, walk naked through Venice, but it turns out that I missed the best part of another performance piece in which an artist slowly releases a raw egg from her vagina, throws it at the screen where it smashes--as though in the face of the viewer--and [...]
The American Theatre of Actors is located at 314 West 54th Street. The same building as Midtown Community Court. During the day, you have to pass through a metal detector to enter, emptying your pockets into a plastic tray and running your bag through an x-ray machine, under the supervision of NYPD. Fortunately, when court is not in session, you [...]
The lobby of The American Theatre of Actors has the dimensions of a good-sized loft. The walls are lined with rows of old theater seating, about half the seats functional, others semi-functional, propped up with wood, or hanging low. Several are covered, permanently out of commission. There’s the box-office. Double doors open on the theater. Facing away from the theater, [...]
Robert Longo--the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker--is in the habit of referring to himself as "Longo," just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, "This is Longo," and when we called back we [...]
Joseph Mitchell is famous for inventing, to a large degree, the tone and style of the New Yorker long profile, of which he is perhaps the unrivaled master (Calvin Trillin has said as much). He is equally (and perhaps a bit more) famous for enduring one of the most grueling and peculiar writer's blocks on record--it lasted from 1964 until [...]
I live where the wide expanse of Houston Street, in crossing 6th Avenue, suddenly dwarfs down to the little tributary of Bedford Street. It's an old Mafia neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop for hours. I've lived here 12 years, long enough so my neighbors and I know each other, or so I thought. I have one neighbor, Joe, [...]
I was reading the fall issue of Esquire Gentleman recently, experiencing the slightly pleasing, slightly lulling sensation of an American fashion magazine, when I came across a photo of Adolf Hitler in a pin-striped suit. It was part of an article on old-fashioned pin-stripe suits, like the ones worn by the Duke of Windsor or Al Capone, who were also [...]
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away--that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter in a paper bag from [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut: a masterpiece or utter crap? My own impression was that it was utter crap when I saw it a little over a year ago, though I did enjoy the movie in certain ways, none of them, I felt at the time, intended. Since then I watched Kubrick's Lolita again and was [...]
In 1978 I had the only blue record album in the Berkeley Townhouse apartment building, on 35th Avenue, and probably in all of Flushing. It was the age of disco and Cheryl and I, the founding—and only—members of the Funseekers Club, (co-presidents of the Queens headquarters) were about to outgrow the unruly, shag rug in my parents' living room, and [...]
Eventually everything is history - even one's own life. I once caught a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy in the flesh - and that image, so radiant and energizing - has stayed with me for over 40 years. I saw him when I was an actress playing in a comedy called Mary, Mary on Broadway. Next door to my [...]
A ten-foot painted head bobs down Grand Street, feet furiously shuffling from below the neck. Close on his heels are three metallic-haired 20-year-olds dressed in flimsy black sheets, cinched in a manner that make them look like punk Roman centurions. I can tell I’m getting close. Destination: Deitch Projects gallery in SoHo. A few days earlier I had RSVP’d for [...]
Central Park exists because of two writers who cared about the well-being of New York City, including all its people: the poet William Cullen ("Thanatopsis") Bryant, who proposed his idea for the park when he was still studying at Yale and also editing a periodical called the "Evening Post," and to the landscaper and editor of "The Horticulturalist," Andrew Jackson [...]
The dark woman hated me because I listened to Wagner without guilt or regret. She said that she could never understand how I could enjoy the work of such a fierce anti-Semite. I told her that was not a problem; I had learned to separate the music from the composer, and, besides, Wagner pretty much hated everybody. She said that [...]
--July, 2001 It’s a dark and stormy night. The gothic spire of Riverside Church, on the Western Edge of Harlem, is hidden in mist. Throngs of acolytes huddle around the church doors as though awaiting entrance to the gates of a Medieval city. They are Bjork fans. At noon that day a special one-off show in the church’s chapel had [...]
Esteban Vicente arrived into the world in Turegano, Spain, in 1903. In 1921, he arrived at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. He arrived in Paris in 1929, and in 1936 he arrived in New York City. His reputation arrived somewhat later. In 1950, Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro included him in their "New Talents 1950" show at [...]
I had my Ipod on shuffle. All of a sudden strings welled up, sentimental and epic. Then Richard Ashcroft’s voice came on, sounding as though he had the ten commandments in his arms: “I wander lonely streets…” The song was “History,” off of The Verve’s “A Northern Soul.” That record preceded their one US hit, “Urban Hymns,” which contained “Bittersweet [...]
Sometimes I think about the reasons why I love New York, but the one thing I love the most about it is the parades in the summer time. When I was in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at my aunt’s house, we stayed to see the parade. It was the West Indian Parade and everyone was outside. There were dancers hyping the crowd [...]
Adrian Dannatt is not a man easily persuaded to perform manual labor, or labor of any kind. Anything that requires physical effort usually elicits from him an expression of mild horror and incredulity, as though you'd asked if he'd like to stroke a pet cockroach. Therefor it was a memorable occasion when I came upon Dannatt carrying a night table, [...]
'Scape is a new theater company that will stage ten short plays on a Brooklyn rooftop this June. To cast the plays the new theater company employed an old tradition, the audition. The plays will be outdoors and open air, but the audition was held in a small white room in a Bleeker Street cellar--closed air. For three hours the [...]
Like most martial artists of my generation, I dreamt of being the next Bruce Lee--or in my case, the "white Bruce Lee." The difference is I went out and did something about it. As a result, I've actually performed in a dozen or so films (yes, I use that term loosely). The first chop-socky flick I ever did was called [...]
It was 1985 at the original Ritz (East 11th Street; now it's Webster Hall), NYC's greatest-ever rock club. Blind Dates, my big haired happy-go-pop band, was the opening act for the then-popular Aussie group Eurogliders. The place was sold out and teeming with what we called "festive new wave nubiles"--the Rat Pack would have called them "hot chicks." My Grandpa [...]
I was at the bar of Florent very late Sunday night. A snow storm was raging outside. Pastis, that seat of slutty mayhem, sat up the block. There are now tastefully bright lights all over the meat packing district, where there was once just meat and the people who packed it. It was strange to sit at Florent, whose entrance [...]
Late last year the 78-year-old filmmaker and archivist Jonas Mekas debuted his new diary film. The title, awkward but precise, is, "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty." Its running time is around five hours, so it can only play once in an evening. On the first night of its run, Mekas held a little [...]
“Graffiti is alive,” is one of several bits of agitprop that appeared not too long ago on the side of the Brooklyn Bridge. The more drastic any act of suppression is, the more extreme will be the reactions to it. In our zero tolerance, quality of life, war on drugs, law and order prison-industry age, you have to wonder when [...]
Our protagonist, Skunk, in action. Dan a.k.a Skunk and his girlfriend, Erin, pick me up on the corner of Broadway and 116th Street. Skunk briefly reminisces about his days at Columbia University: after a few years of "getting stoned and sitting on the couch" he dropped out and found what could be said to be his calling. Skunk aspires to [...]
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