(Photos: Ted Alcorn)
On a recent afternoon at 3 Dollar Bill in East Williamsburg, a group of performers brainstormed ways to involve the audience in their upcoming site-specific show. “Play Truth or Dare with them?” suggested one. “Make them react to specific musical and verbal cues?” echoed another. “Play trivia: drunk people love trivia!” interjected a third.
(Photos courtesy of New York Mini Libraries)
(Photos courtesy of New York Mini Libraries)
On your way to the polls, grab a leftist polemic or a dystopic novel from the guerrilla mini-libraries that started popping up in old newspaper boxes around Manhattan yesterday.
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas,” a sticker on the newsrack-turned-mini-library on the corner of Reade Street and Centre Street reads, paraphrasing a Franklin D. Roosevelt quote. “Arm yourself.”
Photo via monkeysees_bk on Instagram
Photo via monkeysees_bk on Instagram
You may not get a chance to see Josh Cheuse’s classic shots of Run-D.M.C., currently on display in a Greenwich Village shoe shop, but it’d be hard to miss this. The Queens hip-hop legends are the subject of a massive new mural by Eduardo Kobra, the Brazilian artist who gifted the East Village an epic portrait of Michael Jackson back in July. This one has been going up at the corner of 12th and A, exactly 16 years after Jam Master Jay was gunned down in a recording studio in Jamaica, Queens.
“18 & Stormy” by Richard Prince.
(Photos: Summer Cartwright)
It’s a weird sight: families and high school tour groups smiling and posing against a wall of activists with guns slung on their shoulders, or signs held high above their heads.
Joe Strummer by Josh Cheuse.
A Neil Young song is playing in the background of the small space on Christopher Street where black lacquered furniture and snakeskin-print seats are adorned in skulls, studs, and everything that comes to mind when you think of rock and roll at its most legendary.
(Photo: Ben Trivett)
In the past years, we’ve seen Kat Cunning on the stage with Company XIV singing Lana del Rey’s songs better than Lana del Rey, in high-octane Broadway productions (Paramour; Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and on cable (The Deuce, where she plays a recurring character). What’s more, her first EP might (finally!) be on the way
As if she needed to add to her resume, on November 8, she’ll make her co-directorial debut in CNTRL, a circus-musical performance co-created with House of Yes’ own Anya Sapozhnikova, also starring nine core performers and five extras. A spin on Sleeping Beauty, CNTRL focuses on the power dynamics, the sexuality and the darker aspects of the fairy tale, with Cunning in the leading role. “Control is the word that kept coming up when I was talking about the characters’ power dynamics, and their sexualities, as a reference to power play,” Cunning told Bedford + Bowery. “The word comes up to me as a human when I am working, being a control freak.”
Jaguar Dreams burst onto the indie scene this summer with their modern, lucid cover of Fleetwood Mac‘s “Dreams” and their well-received original singles “Just Life” and “Behind Those Clothes,” both of which were featured on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist and Pandora’s New Music Now and Fresh Electronic playlists. Despite the buzz, the trio remains self-reliant, producing all of their own content and colorful music videos. Today they’re back with “A Real Woman,” from their EP coming out Nov. 16. According to the band, the single, premiering here on Bedford + Bowery, was inspired by “New York City’s undisguised confidence.”