The East Village is a New York City neighborhood with a complicated vibe. It's a place where restaurant equipment wholesalers and ancient brick walk-ups rub shoulders with spanking new condo towers and hip hotels with signature martinis. Almost everywhere there are also traces of the hippie-Boho culture that settled in before the 1960s and does what it can to keep its flag flying.
It's difficult to insert a new building into those streets and get it to speak to so many different contexts. The ideal combination of grit and elegance, muscle and intellect is hard to arrive at, and over the last four or five years some local projects by name architects have gotten it wrong. But Cooper Union's new academic building, which opened this fall, is a genuine triumph, a canny exercise in architectural multilingualism.
John Waters says "You Better Watch Out" is "the best seasonal film of all time." He adds: "I wish I had kids. I'd make them watch it every year and, if they didn't like it, they'd be punished."
And a merry Christmas to you, John.
Artwork has always been a very strong element of the look and feel as well as the patrons of Mars Bar. Throughout its 25-year history, many artists such as Basquiat, Keith Haring and Lee Quinones have spent time here, and today many of the people that hang out here and even the bartenders are artists as well. If you focus your eyes in the dim Marsian light, you can always see a ton of art everywhere in Mars Bar. There are canvases behind the bar, custom paintings on the walls, windows and outside. This combined with the history of Mars Bar, the Old-New-York feel that is impossible to get almost anywhere in downtown Manhattan, and very special regulars that have been patrons of Mars Bar for years with many stories to tell, along with the raw art, make the entire bar a living, breathing, drinking art piece on it’s own. This is not something that can ever be re-created in a stuffy Chelsea gallery.
