A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: New York

Oct 25 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Court Upholds the Taxation of Lap Dances

Court Upholds the Taxation of Lap Dances

James Barron writing for The New York Times on an important legal development in the world of performance art:

[New York] state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, ruled on Tuesday that the lap dances performed at Nite Moves were not “dramatic or musical arts performances,” as Nite Moves had argued. The 4-to-3 decision said that Nite Moves did not qualify for the kind of tax exemption that ballet companies and Broadway producers are allowed to claim.

This type of judicial suppression of the arts is pretty disgusting.

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Oct 14 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Decades of Miss Subways smiled on NYC straphangers

Decades of Miss Subways smiled on NYC straphangers

Associated Press article:

It was an ad campaign conceived as eye candy to bring attention to other advertisements in New York’s transit system. But the “Meet Miss Subways” beauty contest posters of pretty young New York women and their aspirations quickly evolved into a popular and even groundbreaking fixture that ran for 35 years, from 1941 to 1976.

…

The first African-American was crowned Miss Subways in 1948 — long before Vanessa Williams was named Miss America in 1984 — and the first Asian-American was honored in 1949.

“It was the first integrated and ethnically diverse beauty contest in America,” representing working-class women, said [photographer Fiona] Gardner, who was born the year the contest ended. “I realized I had stumbled on a piece of forgotten New York history.”

I don’t know terribly much about the New York City subway system, nor was I alive before 1976, so I’d certainly never heard of this ad campaign before. The reason this story was written is that that quoted photographer, Fiona Gardner, has an exhibition at the New York Transit Museum about Miss Subways starting later this month. Records of the winners were lost, so she tracked down existing copies of the old posters and then the women themselves.

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Aug 04 2012
Mark Twain, probably

Casey Neistat left his bags in an NYC taxi. Watch what happened next in this “OpDoc” (cut that out) produced for the NYTimes.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
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Jan 26 2012
Mark Twain, probably

In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims

In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims

Michael Powell reporting for The New York Times:

Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

“This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America,” a narrator intones. “A strategy to infiltrate and dominate America. … This is the war you don’t know about.”

This is the feature-length film titled “The Third Jihad,” paid for by a nonprofit group, which was shown to more than a thousand officers as part of training in the New York Police Department.

Fucking.

You guys.

God damn it.

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Apr 02 2011
Mark Twain, probably

200th Birthday for the Map That Made New York

200th Birthday for the Map That Made New York

Sam Roberts of The New York Times, writing about the grid plan of Manhattan’s streets on the 200th anniversary of its publication:

The grid was the great leveler. By shifting millions of cubic yards of earth and rock, it carved out modest but equal flat lots (mostly 25 by 100 feet) available for purchase. And if it fostered what de Tocqueville viewed as relentless monotony, its coordinates also enabled drivers and pedestrians to figure out where they stood, physically and metaphorically.

It’s a fascinating story of how a rectangular grid was imposed on the island: houses and property were seized and destroyed when they didn’t fit neatly in the master plan, and the topography of the island itself was leveled by flattening hills and filling in swamps.

Dr. Rose-Redwood calculated that in 1811, of the 1,865 buildings north of Houston Street, 721 stood on newly mapped streets and had to be either razed or moved. As executed, natural topography was ignored (stranding some houses on bluffs). Driving streets through private property sparked not-in-my-backyard revolts. Owners were compensated, though tax assessments also rose on properties bordering the new streets. Clement Clarke Moore, before making a fortune parceling out his Chelsea property and claiming authorship of “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” characterized the commissioners as “men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.”

I love that quote at the end.

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