Head

In one of the community gardens on East Eighth Street near Avenue C.

Noted

Via ComedyJuice:

Don't Let the Muggles Know! - w4mm - 30 (East Village)
Reply to: pers-941491075@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-12-02, 12:27AM EST

I am a lonely, beautiful woman living alone with my cat, Mrs. Norris. I work as a janitor. You will refer to me as Filch.
I need at least 5 men. You will arrive at my apartment. There will be a picture of a fat lady on the door, and you will tell her the pre-arranged password. You will be dressed based on your character. The characters I need are listed below.
Harry Potter: You must be barely legal, and arrive with your firebolt ready for the best game of quidditch you'll ever play.
Ron Weasley: You absolutely must have red hair and freckles. You must show up with firewhiskey.
Draco Malfoy: Blonde. Be able to cry on demand.
Remus Lupin: You will alternate between wolf and man. Howl, baby, howl!
Albus Dumbledore: You must be a proud gay man ready to penetrate every other man present You must have a beard and wear a wizard's hat and half-moon spectacles.
As you arrive, I shall chain you to the walls of my apartment, which I will have converted into a dungeon. Mrs. Norris shall excite you all into the most aroused state you've ever experienced (I've trained her well, so don't worry--if she fails to tickle your pickle, though, I've got a few tricks up my sleeve--engorgio, anyone?).
After I punish you all for being out after curfew, and take a few house points, Harry will escape, grab me around the waist, and begin sodomizing me. With each stroke, he will yell out one of the wrongs I have committed against him (example: "and THIS is for helping Umbridge"). After we've both come harder than Hagrid in heat, Ron and Draco will escape.
Ron will beat Draco with a broomstick I'll provide. Then, he will penetrate the Slytherin with the Cleansweep, who will, at this point, be crying about how his dad's in Azkaban.
Lupin will escape as he "transforms" into a wolf. He forgot his wolfsbane potion tonight! He will have his way with whatever his wolfy instincts demand!
I will then pleasure Ron. With my dirty squib mouth.
Finally, Dumbledore will escape and exact his right as Headmaster of Hogwarts.
Then, firewhiskey all around!
Who knows what else the night will bring...
---
Please send pictures, preferably in costume. I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, and I've been haunted by this fantasy since PoA came out (the book, of course). Please please please help me to realize it!
Also, if you know any submissive small men, we might add a Dobby to the fun.

Hanging 10

To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of city guide NFT (Not For Tourists), Caroline at Flavorwire asked Managing Editor Craig Nelson for "choice snippets" from the first edition of NFT:

The East Village: “We think David’s Bagels on First Avenue rocks. However a Citibank on 7th Street and B would be nice.”

The Lower East Side: “Our favorite hangout is Tonic on Norfolk — great music, great café, great vibe. Also check out Soft Skull Press in the same building. This area is not the culinary capital of Manhattan, unless you love fried chicken at McDonald’s."

The Financial District: “Mayor Giuliani is trying to convince people that downtown is an excellent place to live. There’s nothing here. It’s totally dead at night.”

And some NFT faves from a decade ago...?

The Lanksy Lounge: “Great space, packed with hyenas.”
Howard Johnson’s: “A Times Square haven in a sea of madness.”
Florent: “One of the best places on the planet.”
Tower Records: “For all your mainstream needs.”

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning Edition

RIP Love Saves the Day (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Visiting the Cafe Reggio (Greenwich Village Daily Photo)

At the Chinatown Working Group meeting (Save the Lower East Side!)

Sheila, champion of dive bars, is out at Gawker (Gawker)

Brooks spots a rarity: wooden phone booths (Lost City)

Yoink! (BoweryBoogie)

"Mr. Subbarao is, by his own admission, a 'cocktail geek,' one of a growing legion of amateur connoisseurs who have turned recherché cocktails — whether mixed at home or sought out in bars and restaurants — into a lifestyle, or to hear some tell it, a religion. They receive their education from, and in turn provide a considerable fraction of the revenues for, geeky cocktail bars — recognizable by the devout use of jiggers, the whopping arrays of bitters, and an almost-total absence of vodka. As these bars proliferate, more and more drinkers cross the line from enthusiast to, well, geek." (New York Times)

A great post from Monday: Highlighting the characteristics of the buyers for the Theatre Condo on St. Mark's (Curbed)

Your morning hardcore: "Bye Bye"... by Borscht

Borscht is one of the many NYC hardcore bands playing the A7 reunion Saturday at the Knitting Factory. Tim at Stupefaction will be playing bass with the band. Here's the original lineup doing "Bye Bye" circa 1983.

Old Hop Devil Grill to reopen today with a Southwestern flavor

The former Hop Devil Grill will reopen today, at least according to the sign on the front of the bar on St. Mark's Place near Avenue A....and their Web site:

Hey everyone, we'll be closed until December 3rd due to some renovations we are doing. As you know, or in case you didn't, we feature Southwestern cuisine on our menu, and so we are taking a little time to make our place a little more southwestern. Same excellent beer, sangria, margaritas and fine tequila. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Hop Devil Grill.

Yesterday, workers were busy putting the final fixins' on the exterior.





I took a quick gander inside...and saw the many taps still lined up along the wall...

Previously on EV Grieve:
RIP Hop Devil Grill

What's doing at 72 E. Fourth St.?

As we noted early last month, one-story structures in the neighborhood seem to be an endangered species. (And Jeremiah reported last month that Jam Envelope & Paper's one-level storage space is history.)

So I was curious to learn more about the now-familiar scaffolding around the single-level structure at 72. E. Fourth St. (Between Second Avenue and the Bowery.)



Turns out to be an interesting project. In October 2005, New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) purchased the vacant building -- a former New York City storage facility -- “as is,” from New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development for $1.

According to the NYTW Web site, the site will be "a new scenery, costume and prop workshop. Construction is scheduled to begin in the winter 2008 and be completed in 2009. The facility will be designed and built using sustainable design principles and widely accepted LEED (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) standards, optimizing comfort and health benefits to its employees. Manufactured materials with recycled content will be used, and wood produced from sustainably harvested forests will be used exclusively."



By the way, the day I walked by, there was a "stop work order" slapped on the front dated Nov. 25.

Hope for the Hudson's sign?

Was boohooing the other day about the faded Hudson's Army-Navy Store sign getting painted over during the renovation at 103 E. Third Ave. at 13th Street.



Well, maybe the sign will live...? The last time I looked, the painting had continued on the front of the building. The old sign had been spared...so far. Can it be?

An A7 reunion

Tony Rettman has the story in the Voice on the A7 reunion show taking place Saturday at the Knitting Factory.

Located on the corner of Avenue A and East 7th up until its demise in 1984, A7 was — and still is — a place of legend. Agnostic Front, Heart Attack, the Beastie Boys, Urban Waste, the Abused, the Misguided, and countless others regaled the moshing masses at this shoebox-sized spot long before CBGB ever accepted them. And now that the entire Lower East Side is a fuckin' romper room, it's time for a reunion.

Co-promoter Bryan Swirsky considers Saturday night's event (subtitled "One Big Crowd," after an early NYHC compilation) both a celebration and a tribute to the "action-first" style prominent in the East Village underground at the time. "These weren't soft-handed kids from Iowa putting on a show in the most horrible neighborhood in Brooklyn to call it 'authentic,' " he says. "These were runaways involved in bad activity mixing with hardcore punks who were also rubbing elbows with curious suburban kids coming in for the shows. There was no irony dripping from the fangs of cultural vampires. There was no time to be a culture vampire back then. You just did it."

Stop!

First Avenue near Sixth Street. The Cemusa ad-rotation thing was stuck. And Perry Farrell lost his head.

Che in the city

So Guerrilla opens Dec. 12. Benicio Del Toro portrays the Argentine revolutionary.

Here's how a few of the posters for the film have fared around the neighborhood.




Sixth Street and First Avenue.



First Avenue near Fifth Street.

Meanwhile, as City Room reported, there's a life-size statue at the Doris Freedman Plaza — at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 60th Street — by Christian Jankowski that depicts a street performer dressed as Che Guevara.



According to a post on Commentary magazine from Nov. 21: "Why is the most vibrant capitalist hub in the world playing host to a statue of a murderous communist thug? Bailout mania? The Castroesque extension of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s reign? The base of the sculpture is inscribed with a Che quote that my ignorance of Spanish prohibited me from deciphering. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an apology for committing acts of terror and helping to derail a country for nearly half a century."

Then later:

UPDATE: Apparently, the sculpture is not intended to depict Che Guevara, but rather a street performer dressed as Che Guevara. Which I’m sure makes all the difference in the world to the families of Che’s victims.

Looking at a "stunning hi-def branding production" -- a video on YouTube!

From Dexigner:

Anish Kapoor's huge stainless steel balloon sculpture floats gently out of the Manhattan sky to land on-site at 56 Leonard Street, where it is compressed into final form under the descending weight of architects' Herzog & de Meuron's twisted-glass and steel 57-story hi-rise residential tower.

So opens directing and new media studio Tronic's stunning hi-def branding production, which was designed by partners Jessi Seppi and Vivian Rosenthal, themselves Columbia University trained architects, to conceptually mirror the architects' intent while providing the foundation for the luxury properties' marketing program. Music and sound design was provided by Nylon.

Uh. Huh?

Oh.