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and a few bonus shots....
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DIRTY OLD TOWN: a new gonzo narrative by young trio Jenner Furst, Daniel B Levin and Julia Willoughby Nason. Abel Ferrara presents this indie-feature ...
DIRTY OLD TOWN swirls around Billy's Antiques and Props as owner Billy Leroy faces eviction from his ramshackle tent off Bowery. With 72 hours to pay the rent, his urban Big Top draws in a troop of freaks, renegades and misfits. These strange characters form a colorful tableaux full of carnival pageantry, white lies and victimless crime, in a downtown slice of life that playfully blurs the line between reality and fiction.
The filmmakers spun this strange tale from their previous documentary, CAPTURED, which chronicled the transformation of the Lower East Side through the renegade lens of documentarian, artist and activist Clayton Patterson.
DIRTY OLD TOWN also showcases longtime actor Nicholas De Cegli, AKA Nicky D, a famous fixture in the New York City nightlife scene. Close friend Abel Ferrara refers to Nicky as "John Wayne" within this twisted going out of business story. There are also first time acting debuts from Paul Sevigny the restauranter and Club Guru, Ashley Graham the young full-bodied supermodel and Janell Shirtcliff, aspiring actress, model and wife of MGMT drummer Will Berman.
The filmmakers have used vibrant characters and locations, both real and fictional, to form an eclectic collage, working with available materials and turning film into found art. Executive Producer Marc Levin calls this project "An Absurdist Valentine to a disappearing City".
In more ways than one, DIRTY OLD TOWN reverberates the loss of many bohemian institutions Downtown and an on going change in the culture of New York City.
Leroy's actual landlord, the real estate visionary Tony Goldman, screened the film and despite being depicted as a frill-less curmudgeon, found the tale to be interesting and the irony to be laughable. For years Goldman has been a conscientious force in revitalizing neighborhoods, most famously Soho and South Beach Miami.
DIRTY OLD TOWN from Blowback Productions on Vimeo.
The Bowler from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
Concluding that the vast majority of New York City street fairs are bland and repetitive, and in need of wholesale changes, the Center for an Urban Future today published a report that features ideas for improving these staples of summer from two dozen innovative New Yorkers, including the founders of successful markets like the New York City Greenmarket, Union Square Holiday Market, Brooklyn Flea and Chelsea Market.
The study, titled “New Visions for New York Street Fairs,” starts from the premise that the city’s current system of street fairs desperately need a makeover. It argues that large numbers of New Yorkers are dissatisfied with street fairs for a variety of reasons: there are so many of them that they quickly blend together (there were 321 of them in 2009); a majority of the vendors sell the same bland merchandise, such as tube socks, sunglasses and gyros; a handful of neighborhoods are inundated by the fairs, with a new one popping up almost every week; and with nearly a dozen street fairs on some weekends, the multiple street closures make driving or taking a cab through the city a nightmare. The study seeks to jumpstart a discussion about how to make these public events less generic, more interesting and better reflective of what’s unique about New York.
“New York’s street fairs have been a disappointment for too long,” says Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based think tank. “It’s time to throw out the cookie-cutter approach and create street fairs that better reflect this incredibly unique and diverse city. There’s no reason to see the same vendors selling tube socks and gyros at almost every fair when New York has so many one-of-a-kind entrepreneurs and artists.”
"News From Home: has a crowded soundtrack consisting of city sounds blended with Ms. Akerman's own voice, reading increasingly imploring letters from her mother back home in Belgium... we gradually become able to infer a story — this time, of a young woman’s growing autonomy and escape from the past.
Like William Friedkin's "French Connection," "News From Home" has, with time, become a documentary on New York in the 1970s. Lingering shots of pre-gentrified downtown neighborhoods, graffiti-slathered subway cars and the little village of shops and stands that once filled the Times Square station now carry a sense of impermanence and inaccessibility, of a world receding into the past, just as notions of "home" have receded for the unseen protagonist.