LED Lights On Empire State Building Put On A Show

The Empire State Building got a lighting makeover which debuted this week. Brand new LED light banks have been installed for the building's exterior that now create a rainbow of millions of colors that can flash to a syncrhonized beat.

The premiere of the new system happened Monday evening at 9PM with a radio simulcast of Alicia Keys songs "Girl On Fire" and "Empire State of Mind". The new system is called the Philips Color Kinetic Lighting System and creates a whole new look for midtown's signature tower.

I have to say that as cool as it is it also reminds me of those kooky synchronized house lighting displays, which I've featured on here before. Is this new look too kitschy for the staid Empire State Building?

NYFA Provides Help For Artists Struggling After Sandy

The New York Foundation of the Arts is providing emergency grants to artists in the tri-state area who were affected by Superstorm Sandy. Many artists had their studios flooded in low-lying areas like Red Hook, Gowanus, Dumbo and in Chelsea a number of galleries were hit hard too.

NYFA has been getting generous support from the Warhol and Rauschenberg Foundations, as well as many private donors who have supported this fund, which on average is giving artists 1K-5K. If you need to apply or know any artists who suffered losses due to the storm, you can find out more information about the emergency grants here. Please share this story and help spread the word in the NYC artistic community.

Green-Wood Cemetery Damaged Severely By Sandy

Continuing with the Sandy aftermath stories, there were some photos on the TIMES City Blog over the weekend showing how the superstormstorm did some serious damage at Green-Wood Cemetary in Brooklyn. I've written here about Green-Wood a couple times before and my visits to this beautiful resting place for thousands of New Yorkers, including famous folks like Leonard Bernstein, George Tilyreou and Jean-Michael Basquiat. Located  on the highest landpoint in Kings County and overlooking the harbor, the cemetery took a severe hit from Sandy with nearly 300 trees felled. In addition to that, many headstones and statuary (like the headless angel above) were damages by the falling trees and high winds.

The cleanup is expected to cost nearly half a million dollars and the cemetery, which is a national landmark, is having it's finances strained. Insurance will not cover the headstones and statuary, which are not owned by the cemetery but whose families they commemorate are long gone. So they are seeking donations via their website if you want to check it out. This is one of the most beautiful spots in the city so hopefully they can reach their goal, plant new trees and restore some of the monuments.

200 Year Old Tribeca House Is No Match For Sandy

The TIMES this week had the sad but incredibly detailed story of a 200 year old house (only about 6 blocks from my place) that has not survived Superstorm Sandy. The house, located on Canal Street at Greenwich and less than two blocks from the Hudson, was flooded during the storm and it's already weak structure was further compromised  The city has condemned it and it will now have to come down.

This story is a fascinating look at the history of the city as seen through this one little house. Worth reading if you are an urban history buff, like myself.

HALF-SHARE Show Debuts For Free On The Web Tonight

A couple years ago, I co-produced a pilot for a half-hour comedy called HALF-SHARE, about life in a group house on Fire Island. While the trailer's been online for a while, many people have asked me where they can see the entire show. Well, now I have an answer. Tonight, the show will be "airing" as a free streaming program on the HALF-SHARE website at 10pm EST.  If you miss that, you can also purchase it on Amazon.com at 3 different levels; $1.99 to rent, $4.99 to buy as a digital download, and $14.99 to owne a copy of the DVD.  As an extra incentive to buy, 50% of all net profits from the sales of HALF-SHARE are going to the Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBT youth, which was devastated by flooding during Superstorm Sandy.

The show has actually been available at Amazon for the last few weeks and has received an amazing 5-star review on the site with one word used in most of the reviews--"hilarious".  I may be biased but I would have to agree. This show has an incredibly funny cast, including Alec Mapa, Jack Plotnick and Sam Pancake as well as indie film star Jesse Archer (who also co-wrote and co-directed the show with Sean Hanley, who previously wrote for THE NANNY). So please check it out and support your local indie film/TV friends. I guarantee that, if you do, you will be thankful for the extra laughs this week of Thanksgiving! :)

Nate Silver Is Kinda Cute

In the nervous months leading up to this year's Presidential elections, my friends were all freaking out. They said it's gonna be close, Obama might loose, panic, scream, etc.  However, I was relatively certain this was not going to be the case. Why? I was following Nate Silver's weekly 538 blog on the NY TIMES website.  Silver, a super-nerdy statistician, predicted the final electoral results with 100% accuracy in the end. And now he is a superstar.  Oh yeah, and he's also gay.

Silver officially came out in a piece published in the UK's Guardian today. It turns out this 34 year old wunderkind is also kinda cute, too, so I'm adding him today to the Pantheon of "Kinda Cute" here on Hi-Fi Bri. You can read all about Nate and his mastery of the Presidential numbers game here. Before he got into politics, Silver was a baseball stats geek and before that gamed online poker sites for more then 400K. So let's do the math here...young + smart + gay + rich + kinda cute = total husband material. 

SATURDAY SPECIAL: Look Out! Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends

This is one of the funnier skits I've seen on College Humor. It has a nice soft political spin too in that it is a big argument for marriage equality. Because if we can't have our man, we're gonna take your women! :)  Best line--the quiche.

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

Two Articles This Week In The NY TIMES and NEXT Magazine

In an unusual confluence, two feature articles I've been working on for the past couple of months were published in the last two days. I wrote an article about the emergence and growing popularity of Boylesque for the NY TIMES style section, which appeared in Thursday's paper. And then I have a feature in NEXT magazine's "State of Drag" issue, about the sex and dating lives of drag queens. 

The TIMES piece came about as I've been a bit of a Boylesque fan-boy since attending Tigger's "Man-A-Tease" at the Coney Island Sideshow By The Seashore three summers ago. I think it's a fascinating twist to the whole neo-burlesque revival and really puts an unusual male spin on a traditionally female art form. My story in NEXT came about as they were searching for ideas for the state of drag issue. A friend of mine who has recently been performing in drag told me how it had greatly improved his sex life and that intrigued me.  Not enough to don drag but so much so that it got me to write about the dating lives of drag queens, something I feel is not discussed or heard about even. 

Anyway, hope you enjoy these stories as some weekend reading. And you can look for a couple more stories from me in the TIMES style section in the coming weeks.

The Top 250 Movies On IMDB Get Mashed Up

This is a fun mega-edit of the top 250 ranked films on IMDB.  I found it on the IMDB home page last week and quite liked it for the editing as well as the challenge of trying to identify the source of most of these micro clips. But overall all it's just fun to watch some great movie classics mixed to some seriously hot beats--Joan Jett meets the Beatles meets Cypress Hill. The editor is Jonathan Keough and this is his third clips compilation on YouTube but the first one to go truly viral and get more than 2 million hits. Enjoy!

NY Artist Gives Time Lapse Photography A New Twist

There was a story on the CBS's Sunday Morning news magazine about a local photographer Steven Wilkes. He has an unusual approach to photography which creates stunning photos like the one above. Wilkes rents a Condor crane and sits atop it for 16 hours, taking hundreds of photographers of a New York City scene both during the day and night. Then he composites all these pictures into one super-sized photo in which day transitions into night, from left to right. Though it takes one day to take the pictures, it takes months to paste them together and recreate a "time-lapse" photo of, as is the case above, a day in the park. Gorgeous.