Some Lights In The Darkness Of Downtown

There are a couple beautiful photo essays about life downtown during Sandy.  Today's TIMES has a photo essay of night time pictures during the 5 day blackout. They nicely captures the odd feel of bars lit by candlelight and shopping in delis via flashlight.

It was a surreal life for a few days here but one that had its charms too...especially on Halloween evening when I took a stroll through the east village lit only by a full moon. The HuffPost has a similar story, focusing mainly on Halloween in the east village with some photos too (like the one above taken on Essex and Houston that evening).

Coney Island Takes A Hit From Sandy

One of my favorite places in New York took a hit from Superstorm Sandy last week. Coney Island suffered a lot of damage from the wind and the waves that pummeled the shore Monday into Tuesday. The first thing one sees when getting off the subway at Stillwell Ave is the Shore hotel sign and, as you can see, it was torn apart. There are some other pictures and details of the damage over on this Coney Island blog.

Apparently, the sturdy Cyclone roller coaster survived intact, faring much better than the ride down in Seaside Heights in New Jersey which is now in the ocean.  But one attraction which took a major hit was the Sideshow by the Seashore and the Coney Island USA building  housing the museum. Fortunately, the museum was on the second floor so nothing there was lost. But the Sideshow Theatre was a mess, as was the lobby bar (below). You can see some more photos here on HuffPost as well as a story about how some of the owners of these businesses rode out the storm. To help Coney Island USA in their time of need, you can donate or volunteer.

Photos of Life After Sandy In The Dark Zone aka SoPo

SoPo (that's South of Power!) is the new name for the fashionable but somewhat desolate neighborhood in Manhattan, south of 26th street where the power grid has been offline since around 8:30pm on Monday when Sandy blew into town. I was at home when the lights went off and stayed in the Village for the next three days, living off my supplies and having some festive candlelit dinner parties with local friends.  Here's my photo album of what life was like down in The Dark Zone.

This was a piece of a scaffolding that was torn apart at Hudson and Morton. Warning is right!

This tree fell at the intersection of Christopher and Washington, totally blocking the sidewalk

 The Stonewall Inn said they were open but by Tuesday afternoon, that was not really true anymore.

 People using payphones! How novel but necessary. It was like the 20th century had returned.

This was the scariest thing I saw...a huge village, artist loft skylight picked up and smashed on 8th St.

This was a section of a large tree on the west side of Washington Square. 

Here's a look down the main east/west path of Washington Square. It was closed to public.

Here's the now infamous Chelsea dollhouse which lost it's facade during the early hours of the storm.

My friend Kevin Donaldson hosted a delicious candlelit dinner on Tuesday night.

This was a bus going down the Bowery on Halloween. Scary!

Walking around a dark east village on Halloween, we found this one sign of the holiday.

THE MIAMI CONNECTION Is So Bad It's Good

In the late 1980s, a film was made in Miami that has lately taken on that legendary mantle of a film that's "so bad it's good."  Joining the ranks of SHOWGIRLS, THE APPLE and THE ROOM, THE MIAMI CONNECTION is on it's way to theatres' courtesy of Alamo Drafthouse Films.  You can read more about the bizarre cinema concoction of drugs, ninjas, motorcyles and 80s' synth pop on WIRED. Or you can watch the utterly terrible trailer below.

Witness To Lincoln's Assassination Appeared On 1950s TV

This is one of those things that makes you realize that the past is often not as far away as it seems. Over at the Atlantic, earlier this week they posted a YouTube clip from the TV show I'VE GOT A SECRET showing a 96 year old man from Maryland who was a 5 year old boy in Ford's Theatre the night Abraham Lincoln was shot. He vividly remembers John Wilkes Booth jumping to the stage from the Presidential box and was more worried about Booth's condition from the fall than the President, as it was all a bit confusing what was going on. It's amazing that his lifetime spanned the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement.

In a personal vein, I remember a neighbor of ours, an older woman who sometimes babysat me as a kid, who had a painting of a Civil War drummer boy above her fire place. It was actually a painting of her grandfather who was on the field at Gettysburg. Incredible, right? And let's not forget the well-documented stories of the last 3 Civil War widows who were alive until the mid-2000s (one was even collecting a pension from the Department of Veterans Affairs).

Though it's easy to think of the Civil War as ancient history, it was a mere 150 years ago that the conflict raged and nearly tore apart the country. Coming next month--Steven Spielberg's LINCOLN, which will look at the president's struggle to end slavery as the war, and his own life, came to an end. Here's the trailer below, with a script by Tony Kushner.

LIVE AND LET DIE At Moma's "Bond 50" Retrospective

Over the weekend, I went to the Moma "Bond 50" to see one of my favorite Bond movies LIVE AND LET DIE. This is one of the more unusual films in the 50 year franchise for a number of reasons. Where Bond usually finds himself in exotic and fancy locales, in this one....not so much. It starts off in gritty 1970s NYC actually with a FRENCH CONNECTION-style chase on the FDR (in big honking Caddies) and ends up with detour to Harlem. From there we go to New Orleans, a fictional Carribean island with poppy fields, and then the Louisiana bayou.  Not exactly Monaco and Munich!

However, one reason I like this film is the great sense of humor to the film, mainly due to the presence of Roger Moore. He had a way with the Bond one-liners that hasn't been matched. There is also some great 70's fashion (yes, 007 wears a leisure suit!) and hairdos (Afro-rama!) not to mention the hot Wings title song, "Live and Let Die". This was the first Bond song to be nominated for an Academy Award (it lost to "The Way We Were") and I've found the opening titles on YouTube, which you can watch below.  Also,  I believe this is the only Bond movie in which the song is actually sung as part of the story...in a dive bar in New Orleans by Brenda Arnau.

Anyway, after years of seeing it on TV in the 70s, it was great fun seeing this on the big screen in a gorgeous print at Moma. Next up; the camp classic VIEW TO A KILL (with Grace Jones) on Friday.

Comedian Tig Notaro And Her Stand-Up Routine About Cancer

I heard a remarkable story this week about a standup comedian named Tig Notaro while listening to one of my favorite podcasts The Business, on KCRW. 2012 has not been a good year for Notaro to say the least; she had pneumonia which led to a bacterial infection that put her in the hospital, her mother died suddenly, her girlfriend left her and then, to top it all off, she was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer.

In late August, the day after she got her diagnosis, she had a show at the Largo in L.A. and, though she thought about canceling, went onstage anyway and performed an epic set about her woes which killed. Louis C.K. happened to be in the audience and tweeted about her show the next day saying it was the best thing he had seen in 27 years of standup.

That was enough to launch Notaro's career in a whole new direction. And now a recording of this set from the Largo has been released as a comedy album via Louis C.K.'s website. You can hear an excerpt from the opening of the set on THIS AMERICAN LIFE.  It's really amazing to hear as the audience comes to realize she is not joking but telling the truth, but doing so in an incredibly funny way. As it turns out, Notaro is doing well after a double mastectomy and the cancer is in remission.

A Daring Art Exhibit Draws Censorship In Vienna

The Leopold Museum in Vienna has put together a daring show about the male figure in art over the last 200 years called "Nude Male: From 1800 to Today".  On the surface, that may not sound controversial but in the world of museums, the male nude has always taken a backseat to the female form and this is a rare exhibit which focuses solely on men.  

The poster for the exhibit, a photo of 3 naked soccer players by French photograph team Pierre et Gilles, has caused a stir though forcing the museum to self-censor the image in outdoor advertising. Of course, if you walk around NYC and many other European cities, you'll see naked women 50 feet tall on billboards (and in much more erotic poses than these sporty fellows) which haven't cause much of a stir. But the minute you have a naked man in public view, it's the end of the world as we know it. And in Vienna, the museum quickly caved to the flurry of protests.

If you're interested, you can see the uncensored version online along with some other selections from this wide-ranging exhibit, which includes works by Ego Schiele, Andy Warhol and Louise Bourgeios. It would be great to see this kind of survey at the Met or even the MoMA but that might be asking a lot.  However, the Brooklyn Museum was recently brave enough to host the traveling version of the Smithsonian's Hide/Seek exhibit....so maybe this will be coming to a borough near you in the next few years.

Romney's "Binders Full Of Women" Are Trending Post-Debate

Within minutes after Mitt Romney said it during last night's debae, Twitter and Facebook lit up with the phrase "Binder Full of Women".  He was referring to an initiative he claims to have started in Massachusetts to hire women but his unfortunate phrasing turned it into an instant meme and, essentially, the "Big Bird" moment of this debate as far as the Internet was concerned.  By midnight, less than two hours after the debate ended, there was an active Tumblr dedicated to the meme which is where I found the above photo (which made me chuckle).

All joking aside though, the claim Romney made during the debate last night is not exactly true. The now infamous binder was part of a larger initiative to get women more involved in government and it was prepared in 2002, before anyone knew who the incoming governor would be. Romney was essentially handed the binder when he took office.  What is it about this candidate and his propensity for half-truths designed to make him look better? In the end, and after some simple Internet fact-checking, they really end up just make him look desperate to win....at any cost.

Before Romney/Obama Round 2, Mitt Debates Himself

As Mitt and Barack make their final preparations for their second debate tonight, there's some great videos circulating on the web of Romney debating himself. In the first debate, in a desperate effort to make himself a moderate, Romney contradicted a number of his previously stated positions.  In some cases he said the exact opposite of what he had said on the campaign trail months and even weeks before that debate.  So someone at Daily Kos put together this handy video where Romney debates himself on a number of these issues.  

So far this video and a subsequent one have nearly 3 million hits. Let's hope that with this and a stronger debate performance by the president tonight that the truth about Romney's positions will become evident to the voting public.  There was much criticism of President Obama's performance in the first debate but honestly I think he was in a state of shock as he found himself debating an opponent whom he literally did not know. Hopefully he can clarify some of this tonight and make it clear to the public who the real Romney is.