Meanwhile, in London: In case you're in Notting Hill tonight

Off topic (again)...Regardless, wanted to share this invite that was forwarded to me...:

“Select Group, the Swankiest party in town!”
Whilst most of us are facing a long miserable winter with a nose-diving economy, it appears that the cream of London’s A-listers are setting their sights to sunnier (and more profitable) climbs as they flock to the biggest and most prestigious party in London, of the year!

On the 25th September 2008, Select Property & Select Group Limited will be celebrating the launch of its new unique development in Dubai named ‘Aquitainia’ and who better to host this spectacular soiree than the ‘million dollar baby’ herself, Hilary Swank!

Two-time Oscar winner Swank, who is renowned for her astute business brain and love of Dubai, will play host at boutique hotel ‘The Hempel’ in Notting Hill showcasing the deluxe beachfront properties that epitomize glamour and style and are attracting fellow A-listers in droves.

This is the first time since 2006 that Miss Swank will be back in London Town, and she brings with her Grammy Award winner Kelly Rowland! Miss Rowland, a regular visitor and huge star in Dubai, will be setting the live soundtrack to the evening with whilst the guests rub shoulders and mingle with their potential new neighbours.

Miss Swank isn’t pulling any punches with this affair and has confirmed many other guests – to be announced nearer the time.
It looks like everyone who is anyone wants a piece of this million dollar action and with names in Aquitainia like ‘Cannes Beach Villas’, ‘Monaco Villas’ and ‘St Tropez Marina’ these properties are simply out of this world and a world away from the doom and gloom of the UK’s headlines.

There will be unique interview opportunities with Miss Swank and Miss Rowland. For more information or interview opportunities with Miss Swank or Miss Rowland, please contact XXXXX

MISS SWANK WILL PROVIDE A PRESS STATEMENT BEFORE ENTERING THE VENUE IN A PRIORLY APPROVED AREA OUTSIDE THE VENUE.

Information about the Party

The event in London will take place in “The Hempel” boutique hotel located in London’s Notting Hill. The event will include a champagne reception, speeches and live performances.

The party will take place between 19:00 – 22:00 on Thursday 25th September 2008.

"Back in that old shithole, New York"

Here's a snippet from the short documentary Henry Miller Asleep & Awake from 1975, "a voyage of ideas about life, writing, sex, spirituality, nightmares, and New York that captures the warmth, vigor and high animal spirits of a singular American artist." Miller was 81 when this was filmed.



(Thanks to Stories from the Apple Core for turning me on to this...)

The outsiders: Brit art on the Bowery

Page Six reports today: THE British are coming, but East Villagers don't want them. Famed London art gallery Lazarides is opening a show called "The Outsiders" at 282 Bowery tomorrow, which will display the incendiary works of Paul Insect, Jonathan Yeo, Miranda Donovan and others. But John Penley, leader of the Slacktivists, who are fighting the yuppification of the area, told Page Six his group will protest. "This is not street-level graffiti or poor starving artists from the area," he fumed. "They're all rich. Paul Insect's last works were bought by Damien Hirst for $1 million. And they are all Brits. There are plenty of local downtown artists more deserving." The gallery had no immediate comment.

More on what Lazarides have been up to on the Bowery.

Bowery Boogie's coverage is here.

Bob Arihood has details here.

Sure was nice out yesterday

Though was it this nice?

In Tompkins Square Park.

Like a crash virgin...

Doree Shafrir and Irina Alexksander look at "crash virgins" in this week's Observer, young New Yorkers experiencing their very first economic downturn.

An excerpt!

Lizzy Goodman was one of the fortunate ones of the class of 2002; upon graduating from Penn, she had a job lined up as an assistant teacher at Buckley, the all-boys school on the Upper East Side. Six years later, she’s an editor at large at Blender. Like some of her peers, she seems hopeful that, instead of being a harbinger of utter doom, this crash will instead level the playing field just a little bit.
“I don’t think anyone is hoping for American financial collapse just so that the Bowery can be seedy again,” said Ms. Goodman, who lives in the West Village. “But on the other hand, if in the wake of this collective shuttering and fearing comes a return to old school ’80s boho New York, I would certainly be in favor of that.”
The disconnect between the New York of legend and the reality of living here has perhaps never been starker. “I know a lot of people who moved to New York for something that isn’t in New York right now,” said Mr. Fischer, the marketing strategist. “There is a sense that things are in transition. I think there’s a big question of how this will change the social and cultural landscape of New York in the next two or three years. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s excitement—but it’s apprehension that something is definitely happening.”
Of course, that’s a story that’s been years in the making; the disappearance of Lehman Brothers and the conversion of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley into bank holding companies—as recently as last year thought to be a sacrilege—isn’t going to make $4,000 a month one-bedrooms on the Lower East Side any cheaper. (Or if it does, they’ll go to $3,500 a month, not $1,500.) The days when a photographer could buy an abandoned bank building on the Bowery for $102,000—as the photographer Jay Maisel did in 1966—are over; they are not coming back. (See also: the Playpen, smoking in bars, liquid lunches, Passerby, subway tokens, the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue and 21st St., et cetera, not to mention the Algonquin Round Table, the Automat, Spy magazine, Warhol’s Factory, and the Palladium. Also: typewriters.) Some Wall Street types may flee; a few Wharton grads might move to Boston or San Francisco. But it seems highly unlikely that the crash will herald in some utopian new era of “creativity” or allow artists to colonize Soho, or even the East Village, again. It’s over! You missed it! Even Rent has closed! Besides, the Russians are here now.

What will a return to 1970s NYC be like?: "Well find out when we get there"

Over at the Village Voice, Roy Edroso responds to Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker essay on Wall Street's collapse and a possible return to the 1970s NYC:

Paumgarten avoids going all the way with this, suggesting that we can have the sweet side of the 70s cup without tasting the bitter. The collapse has unloosed something in him; for a long time such as he could not mention New York's bankrupt days without a show of revulsion, as old-world types could not mention the devil without crossing themselves. But the Wall Street debacle tells him that those prayerful gestures have come to naught: the bubble's burst and the wolf is at the door. Now he can admit that there was something cool about those old days, and he can even be glib about them.
But when that 70s show really goes into re-runs, we won't be able to edit out the unfunny bloopers. There was never a chance that we'd get cheaper rents without a crash, and as of now the market fluctuations are only ruffling the high end of the market. We're a long way from the vintage conditions of that last renaissance. Before you can have the Ramones, you have to have rehearsal spaces that even glue-sniffing slackers can afford. Before you can have Taxi Driver, you have to have urban moonscapes that don't need to be built by film crews. And you only get those in the wake of real catastrophe.

Joy-popping the 70s is a fun pastime, but be not deceived: playful speculation is nothing like the real thing. We remember fondly our $125-a-month railroad flat in a forsaken neighborhood called the East Village, and the good times we had there. We also remember nightly gunfire, mugger money, and Etan Patz. Are we willing to accept one to get the other? It's not worth wondering about: we'll find out when we get there.

[Photo of 216 E. 7th St. in 1979 by Marlis Momber.]

Bonus: Are you ready for 1974 again?



And! If you don't have time to watch all of the 39 Death Wish movies, let's just get to it:

The many lives of the Roseland (For Part 2: Man, it's so loud in here)

I love the Roseland Ballroom on West 52nd Street. Not so much as a concert venue. But for its history. Since 1919, the Roseland has been an ice rink, a roller rink and a dance hall. Blogger Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company provides this summary:

The Roseland Ballroom was built in 1919 at 1658 Broadway, near 51st Street. It was the second in a string of three Roselands built by Louis Brecker (the original was in Philadelphia). Brecker envisioned a cheap but respectable dance hall: "home of refined dancing." It became one of America's most famous dance halls, in part due to its booking of upcoming jazz greats such as Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong, in part due to stunts like female prizefighting bouts and law-breaking dance marathons.

After a couple of decades, it jacked up it's refinement factor in order to become "family entertainment": more decor, less taxi dancers, no jitterbugging, bouncers in tuxedos. In 1956, it moved two blocks into a former ice rink at 239 West 52d Street. The older Roseland was demolished.

(Cosmodemonic goes on to discuss how the Roseland played a key role in Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn.")

As the New York Times noted in October 1996: The 1939 ''W.P.A. Guide to New York City'' described Roseland as ''the downtown headquarters for hot music and such urban dance steps as the cake and collegiate, the Lindy and the Shag.'' Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie and other big-band names played Roseland in the 1920's and 1930's.

Roseland was almost lost in the 1990s:

Roseland's dance floor is magnificent, but the rest of the interior is now well beyond shabby, with faded carpets and worn paint. The curved Iceland ceiling is painted black but marked with many holes; otherwise there is no trace of the rink. The gallery level is a warren of empty rooms, littered with debris. Graffiti and a black, spray-painted ''body piercing booth'' are leftovers from rock concerts that take over the house a few times a month -- ''Soul Coughing'' is due on Nov. 29.

Despite its age and condition, Roseland Dance City is a fascinating leftover in New York entertainment culture -- there is no hype, no flash, no marketing, no product tie-ins, just the swirl of dancers from expert to beginner. It's one of those unprocessed experiences that we say we want, but which may vanish very soon.

The Roseland survived, of course. Again and again. Different locations. Different genres. New tastes. A Time magazine feature from 1957 reports:

When a public dance hall named Roseland opened on Broadway in 1919, smart young people had recently deserted the waltz for the foxtrot, were just beginning to master the delicate nuances of the shimmy. Sam Lanin and his Ipana Troubadours were on the bandstand, thumping out such Ziegfeld Follies hits as Mandy and You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea. Since that distant New Year's Eve, generations of stag-line Romeos and their girls have bunny-hugged Lindy-hopped, Charlestoned, big-appled black-bottomed and jitterbugged under Roseland's star-studded ceiling. At 1 o'clock one morning last week the stars winked out for the last time; the following night Roseland reopened in glittering new quarters, billed as "a magnificent metropolis of melody and merriment."

Family Entertainment. Although professional nostalgics lamented the demolition of the old Roseland building as the end of an era, the dance hall had actually been changing its function for a long time. It started as a refuge for the "poor young clerks" Scott Fitzgerald wrote about; it evolved into a place of family entertainment.

Part 2:

Whew. Anyway! Why bring all this up? I was there last night for the My Bloody Valentine show. I won't get into all that here. But I will in the comments if anyone wants to chime in....Take it away Alex.

From last night:

P.S.

Oh, speaking of Roseland, here's a snippet of 1977's Roseland, the Merchant-Ivory film starring Christopher Walken:

About that "giant-robot laboratory" on East Sixth Street

As you may know, New York has a great piece this week on 190 Bowery, a space that I've long been curious about. Wendy Goodman gets right to it in her lead:

The building at 190 Bowery is a mystery: a graffiti-covered Gilded Age relic, with a beat-up wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been opened since La Guardia was mayor. A few years ago, that described a lot of the neighborhood, but with the Bowery Hotel and the New Museum, the Rogan and John Varvatos boutiques, 190 is now an anomaly, not the norm. Why isn’t some developer turning it into luxury condos?

Because Jay Maisel, the photographer who bought it 42 years ago for $102,000, still lives there, with his wife, Linda Adam Maisel, and daughter, Amanda. It isn’t a decrepit ruin; 190 Bowery is a six-story, 72-room, 35,000-square-foot (depending on how you measure) single-family home.

There's another building that I've been curious about: 421 E. Sixth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.



I was told years back that an artist lives there. Indeed.

According to Forgotten New York: "421 was a Con Edison substation built in 1920-21 that converted direct current to alternating. It is at present (2008) the studio of modern artist/sculptor Walter De Maria. His most famous installation is The Lightning Field (1977) is permanently installed in the desert at Quemado, New Mexico, and was commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, who run the site and provide accommodation for visitors. The work consists of hundreds of stainless steel rods projecting from the ground to a uniform height of around six metres (20 feet). Rows of 20 rods extend for one mile, while rows of 16 extend for a kilometre, making a square grid of standard and metric proportions. The work is designed to attract spectacular lightning strikes."

NY Songlines has a few more details: "This building, which looks like a giant-robot laboratory, was actually built in 1919-21 as a New York Edison transformer substation — turning DC current into AC. Since 1980 it's been owned by artist Walter De Maria."



Wonder if we'll ever get to see the inside of this space...

Related:
Miss Representation on 421 E. Sixth St.

The money shots of Wall Street (so to speak)

Someone did a nice little edit job on Wall Street, as in the 1987 Oliver Stone film.

An appreciation: A sign that I like

On Cherry Street. Haven't seen much lately about this site becoming a condo...