(Photo: Liz Clayman)
By now you may have heard that, hot on the heels of opening Westlight on the roof of Williamsburg’s shiny new William Vale hotel, Andrew Carmellini has opened his bottom-floor restaurant, Leuca. Grub Street noted that the Italian spot is serving “New York’s most elegant sundae,” which will surprise no one who’s had the decadent, over-the-top La Fantasia di Doppio Cioccolato at one of the chef’s other spots, Locanda Verde.
@lou_sarowsky on Instagram.
In 2002, “Lurker” Lou Sarowsky moved to New York City with his longtime friend and fellow Cape Cod native Zered Bassett, into a now infamous, windowless apartment in Lower Manhattan. Sarowsky dubbed it the “Vicious Cycle” house, and his crew kept up a rigorous schedule of skateboarding all day and filming for Bassett’s indie-skate video of the same name, followed by nights of smoking, drinking, and playing pool.
Photographer Nick McManus tore through Halloween like a bat out of hell, and came back with these party portraits.
Tonight, the theme of The Party by Ostbahnhof is Berlin underground. The house music is so loud that it punctuates bodies and walls. A heaving crowd populates the dance floor as video screens radiate kaleidoscopic images. Then, suddenly, the music stops. A woman in flapper pearls and a black lace teddy is covered from head to toe in powdery corpse paint. She raises a helicopter pilot’s microphone to her mouth and shouts a string of German words, brave and harsh-sounding.
The best party of the year has now already happened– sorry, everybody who didn’t make it to Bike Kill on Saturday. Organized once again by the Black Label Bicycle Club, the October tradition continued for the 13th year with all of the usual crazy stunts, freaky mutant bikes, loud music, dumb-ass costumes, vast amounts of booze, and tons of glorious mayhem.
Trans-Pecos/Instagram
It was a tough summer for Brooklyn’s DIY scene. There was the sudden shutdown of Palisades, followed by the closure of DIY-gone-legit venue the Acheron; then we lost Secret Project Robot, and soon enough, we’ll be saying RIP Aviv. The troubling number of ousters makes the latest news all the more welcome: Trans-Pecos, last night, announced that a new “annex” is on the way.
Mono No Aware festival (Photo via Mono No Aware Facebook)
For a long time we’ve heard that analog film formats– for both making and viewing– are on the verge of mass extinction and very soon will be swallowed up by digital photography and filmmaking, never to be seen again. Recent events seem to confirm this prediction– in July, the last manufacturer of VHS players announced that it was quitting the game and shortly after, the Chinese factory where the clunky, black plastic boxes were made for Sanyo ceased production. The end came quietly, and some people were surprised that VHS consoles were still being made at all, since it had been nearly a decade since Eragon, an elf/fantasy movie, was the last ever to be released on VHS. Even before that, Fujifilm had stopped manufacturing motion picture film. As somebody once (pretentiously) told me, books, which are a lot like film in this context, are “nothing more than fetish objects” nowadays.
The J train during happier times. (Photo: Everett Bogue/ New York magazine)
Thousands of people riding the J train at rush hour this morning experienced a total and complete shitstorm after an off-duty police officer allegedly assaulted a conductor while the train was pulling out of Essex Street station. According to the MTA, the conductor pulled the emergency break and brought the train to a standstill, all but one of the cars were stuck outside the station at 9:15 am– prime getting-to-work time for many riders. The J line ceased service for a full hour, leaving platforms packed with unhappy commuters.
Mopers of the world unite! A Morrissey dance party is coming to Littlefield, in Gowanus, on Saturday, Sept. 24. Okay, you’re probably lamenting: “But I haven’t got a stitch to wear.” Well, may we suggest the new Garbage Pail Kids sticker that portrays Meaty Morrissey in the grips of a nightmarish meat-and-greet? (Hey, it was either that or a double-decker bus crashing into Moz.)
(Photos: Endrit Slaughter via The Sloodge’s Facebook)
If you were recently enjoying a peaceful night in your quiet apartment in Park Slope when, all of a sudden, a crowd of nearby 20-and-30-somethings start chanting “U.S.A” and beating each other up and ruining your evening, well, Matt Proctor might be the person to blame.Proctor, an artist and member of the performance collective/show house the Sloodge, recently staged a DIY wrestling show—the first of the new Brooklyn Backyard Wrestling promotion—in his backyard in Brooklyn where, of course, things got weird.