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Obama single-handedly revives newspaper industry by creating news people actually want to read

Zipper Theater Closes

Just like that. Playbill announced that they closed their doors today, but theater owner Lee Z. Davis provided no explanation. The theater's website still lists upcoming shows. In fact, it had just booked shows for Pinchbottom's Murder Most Naked, starring several New York neo-burlesque stars. Even this small homegrown Manhattan based Burlesque industry is hurting from the recession. It had been four months since they've had a new show.  All Jo Boobs Weldon could say was, "Sad, sad, sadness."--Sherry Mazzocchi

Love Saved the Day

After 40-some years (and over 20 at its location on Second Avenue and 7th Street), Love Saves the Day will close on January 15th. The East Village will never be the same again. We loved you and now we will miss you, too.

 

A new paradigm for our time?

Teun Hocks New Works exhibit opens at P.P.O.W. Gallery on January 8th.

Photographer Rowland Scherman tells all

Come and hear famed photojournalist Rowland Scherman talk about some of the most fascinating people of the 1960s while supporting a major Chelsea institution.

Scherman photographed some of the most fascinating people of the 1960's--Dr. Martin Luther King, Stokley Carmichael, James Baldwin, Robert F. Kennedy, Arthur Ashe, Art Buchwald, Abbie Hoffman, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Eric Clapton and Woody Allen.  He won a Grammy for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Album cover.

The event is free and proceeds from the sale of prints will benefits St. Peter's Chelsea Food Pantry.

Thursday, November 20 at St. Peter's Chelsea, 346 W. 20th St. (between 8th and 9th Ave.)

Reception begins 6 pm, presentation at 7:45 pm. The exhibit continues until December 6.

The Future of Fine Art

“Today you won’t have a name like Picasso anymore.”  That’s the view of Sundaram Tagore, who was speaking at his gallery in Chelsea last Tuesday evening about The Future of Fine Art.  “The age where a few artists command world wide recognition is over,” he said.  “Each country is developing it own artists, movements and styles.”

The art market is not only taking off in China, India and Dubai, but also Latin America and Russia. Globalization has transformed technology and world economies and now is in the process of creating what Tagore calls a “seismic shift in the art world.” Fifteen years ago, New York’s elite art institutions, critics and curators dictated their terms to the rest of the world.  “Today that authority and centralization no longer exists,” he said.

Now cities like New Delhi, Beijing, Taipei and Seoul have huge art markets.  Tagore cited the new Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMoMA) as just one aspect of India’s thriving art market.  Cities all over the world are now creating their own biennales or triennales.  “Look at what Miami Basel has done.  Last year over 300,000 people from around the world and 352 private jets flew in,” he said. “It’s crazy.”  These markets are also a function of booming economies.  While contemporary African artists are producing great work, their market is stalled because the citizens are not able to support it. 

Foreign art markets still have a wild west quality. While artists in New York, London or Berlin are generally represented by only one gallery, that is not always true in other countries.  An artist in China or Russia might be represented by as many as 20 galleries.  “There’s a lot of flipping going on,” Tagore said. 

When one audience member commented that art was just artifice, Tagore reminded us that art has been with us from the very beginning—from 40,000 year old cave paintings, to Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance paintings to the modern art of today.  “Fundamentally, art will exist as long as humanity exists because we need it,” he said.  “We can’t live without it.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

Today There Would be No Bob Marley

At CNN’s Internet Week event on entertainment, Charlie Walk said he would’ve never gone into the music business if he knew what it would be like today, Brett Bouttier said the long tail is crap and Mark Golin said he doesn’t want users to be able to comment on People stories.  But other than that, they were all positive about their “brands” and their ability to monetize them on new and emerging platforms.  The CNN event, moderated by Scott Donaton of Entertainment Weekly last Thursday, was packed, being second only to an event that featured Bono a couple of years back.

The only panelist who was completely positive about her brand was Gillian Sheldon, Supervising Producer of TMZ.  She likes to watch what happens to a story if you edit a headline or change photo and see how many more people will click on it.

Charlie Walk, president of Epic Records, said he was mostly bullish on the future of the music industry, but monetization is their biggest issue.  He said he music industry sat back on their CDs and never saw it coming.  He foresees a time in the near future when the music industry will make money again—everyone will be paying $9.99 a month to access every song on their devices. 

While Walk referred to his Blackberry as his ‘third arm,’ Golin said, “I use my Blackberry to kill a bug.” Editor of People.com, Golin said the new media has ruined everything.  He used to have the luxury of planning content over a long period but now time is condensed.  Editors have to work right through the late life cycle of a story.  They can’t spend time mapping out content, but have to constantly manage it on the site. “I used to have a life,” he said, “but now I don’t.”  He related how users navigate his site, saying, “They read the first paragraph. Then they go to the celebrity database because they want to see the last three stories that they missed before finishing this story.  Then they go off and look at a video.  And then their mind will wander and they will look at all of the dresses she’s worn in the last nine months.  And then they will come back and read the rest of the story.”

Bouttier, senior vice-president of Digital Warner Brothers television, said they were working with the advertisers to try to figure out how to make money off of the different platforms.  “As the new media becomes more pervasive, we can monetize that through advertising. Downloading these $4.99 aps is just a very small way of looking at the business of media.  We need to create critical mass.”

The music business is quickly approaching the critical mass model.  Walk talked about hearing a killer song that he knew would not only be a hit, but also had to “be in the fourth quarter campaign for somebody.  We reached out to ad agencies and went right to Old Navy.  They want to take this artist and—not just for a license--but for a massive multi-million dollar campaign that incorporates the artist in a whole wider scope.”

When an audience member asked him about how gatekeepers field world music, and specifically mentioned Rachid Taha’s spectacular cover, Rock el Casbah, Walk said “Just go on line and get a sense of what the mass audience wants and it’s not that.  But I’m with you.”  Walk said the music industry is about hits, not being hip. He said people still want to be told what is cool.  (For those of you are hip, Taha’s Algerian rai band is performing at SummerStage in Central Park on July 5th at 3pm.)  He talked about Billy Ocean, who’s Caribbean Queen hit of the late ‘80’s was played so much that he became a huge star.  “The real issue is that if it doesn’t sound instantly familiar to someone, you’re fucked.  When you have someone that’s new or a little to the left or a little to the right and doesn’t hit the mainstream per se, that’s the way things get lost.  That’s one of the drawback I see today.”  An audience member commented that today there would be no Bob Marley and that even Bono said there would be no U2 under today’s music industry.

Bouttier maintained that was precisely the strength of mainstream media.  “All of the big films right now are sequels—franchises; Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Batman.  All this stuff are things people know and stories they understand and are getting retold in fascinating ways. I personally think companies that we all represent here are in the business of top-notch programming and the long tail is crap.  It’s for the guy who never got his book on the front table at Barnes & Noble.”

Afterward, audience members I talked to praised the panel’s honesty, but felt that they weren’t even preaching to the choir, but just to themselves.  “It’s not that people don’t spend money on music,” Alejandro Crawford, CEO of Nolej Studios, said.  “People like spending money. They spend it on gadgets like iPods.” He compared the monolithic media companies to the steel industry or to Kodak.  “Why did they lose their market?  They just loved selling film.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

Come Out and Play Festival

Why is play so important? Because, says Catherine Herdlick, play makes hard things fun. Deciphering complicated social issues and nuances is easy when it’s all part of a game. Herdlick is the co-founder of The Come Out and Play Festival taking place this weekend.

The 24 entirely free games in this festival are designed with New York’s public spaces in mind.  Most of the events will be concentrated around Tompkins Square Park and Bluestockings bookstore, the sponsor for the event.  “This is an homage to the city of New York,” Herdlick said.  “It’s a party for the city.”   Since New York is such a stressful and exhausting place to live, she says we are especially good at play.  Most New Yorkers would probably relish playing Pigeon Piñata Pummel, Super Happy Fun City Bingo or Manhattan Megaputt. Herdlick designed Bike Friendly City for the festival.  Played on Sunday at 3 pm, the object of the game is to ‘pimp and build bike lanes for points and cred.’ Herdlick used to ride with Critical Mass, but said it stopped being fun when the events took on a political protest subtext.  This game is designed to recapture the spirit and adventure of biking in the city. 

Herdlick and the other four gamers behind the festival all used to (or still) work at Gamelab.  Before long, they realized each of them independently create and play outdoor games on their own.  Having teamed up, they are now experienced players.  This is their second play festival in New York.  They also held one in Amsterdam and are associated with London’s Hide and Seek Festival. 

Most of the game designers have tech backgrounds but games like Thread, Metrophile or Search Brigade don’t use any devices.  Fort Amsterdam uses GPS and the Comfort of Strangers uses an ipaq PDA and headphones.  Other games use text messaging or Bluetooth. Hendlick says technology like text-messaging is so incorporated into daily life that it doesn’t feel intrusive.  In addition, for certain adults, it can actually serve to lower the barrier to play.  “You can play as a grown-up with a gadget,” she said.

Herdlick, who did her graduate thesis on Play and Public Space at Parsons School of Design, said that generally three different kinds of people are attracted to game design; people with a technology background, performers or philosophers.  “These are the three elements that drive any game,” she said.  Jane McGonigal, designer of The Lost Sport of Olympia, possibly best expresses all three qualities.  McGonigal has a PhD from Berkeley in Performance Studies and MIT Technology Review named her as one of the top 35 innovators changing the world.  Scheduled for play in Central Park on Saturday at 4:30 pm, it is billed as a long lost Olympic game.  Herdlick said it is an “authentic fictional mythology--a new class of folk game.”  Playable by people of all ages, she describes it as “simple and elegant as tag.”—Sherry Mazzocchi

The Come Out and Play Festival starts this Friday and runs through Sunday.

The Chelsea Hotel in all its Fading Glory

Last night both Julia Calfee and Ed Hamilton took  to the mini stage at McNally Robinson to talk about the Chelsea Hotel. Julia showed slides from her luscious book Inside: The Chelsea Hotel. The 81 black and white unposed photos from her book are all shot in natural light and printed the old fashioned way, in a darkroom. Even though the photos have been taken within the past four years, they seem to capture a bygone era--possibly the hotel's last gasp of bohemian glory.

Ed read a chapter entitled The Truth About Those Fancy Hotels from his gem of a book, Legends of the Chelsea Hotel. He told me later that he likes to read that story because it conveys the craziness of the hotel.  The audience had questions about the artistic energy that pervades the hotel, the "millions of dollars worth of artwork" on the walls, and the photo of Rose Wood.  My favorite question was when someone asked Julia and Ed if they were ever worried that the lack of sanitary conditions would put their health at risk.  Ed said he had worried more about the junkies, but now it's the new management that concerns him.--Sherry Mazzocchi

World Science Festival

Hats off to Brian Greene and Tracy Day for organizing the supremely successful World Science Festival.  Greene, professor of physics at Columbia University and author of The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos, wrote an op-ed in Sunday's New York Times saying we have failed children because science is boring.  We've stressed the details--the mind numbing drills, solving equations and learning all of the parts of the cell.  These things are all important, but we are missing the bigger picture.  The fundamental reason that science is so profound is because we search for answers to questions like where did we come from and why is the universe the way it is.  When you pursue science with a sense of wonder and curiosity instead of drudgery and drill, children will want to be scientists.  In essence, we have taught science backwards.  Inspire and captivate first, then present the details.

But instead of merely bemoaning that we do a lousy job of inspiring children and adults to take a greater interest in science, he has actually done something about it.  He and Tracy Day put together this hugely successful festival with experts from a wide array of fields, including a hefty amount of Nobel Laureates.  Over 40 events with 22,000 attendees were completely sold out.  The science street fair for children in Washington Square Park was attended by over 100,000 people.  Not only that, if you missed the festival entirely, you will be able to watch nearly everything on the website within the next few days.

In one of the events, Greene said that while the ideas of quantum mechanics are not widely absorbed by the public, our culture has freely adopted its language.  We all use the technology made possible by physics--televisions, cell phones and iPods, but most of us don't have a clue why these things work.  We live in a world shaped by science.  Solutions to the biggest problems we face--climate change, fossil fuel dependence, health care, aging infrastructures and scarce resources--all require science.  Greene said that science is the greatest of all adventure stories.  We need the most adventuresome of souls to conquer these problems.--Sherry Mazzocchi