Endless Poetry
Clearly, multi-talentedness runs in the family. Like his 37-year-old son, the elder Jodorowsky has composed music for films in which he has also acted— namely his cult masterpieces, El Topo and The Holy Mountain. At various times, he’s been a circus clown, a puppeteer, a mime, a novelist, a comic book artist, and a practitioner of his own brand of “shamanic psychotherapy,” called psychomagic.
Trump. That’s all that was spelled out this afternoon when artist David Datuna laid down some cool art in Union Square. The all-caps letters were made of large blocks of dry ice that emitted fog that drifted away in the wind. On top of the blocks, some of which were cracked, were notes that said #thistooshallpass.
New work by JJ Brine of Vector Gallery (Image courtesy of the artist, JJ Brine)
Last time we spoke to JJ Brine, the man behind “the official art gallery of Satan,” he told us that Donald J. Trump was “pure poison.” That was in August, right after the Republican National Convention. JJ, the self-declared “Crown Prince of Hell,” refused to say much more about the GOP candidate, even though Brine had his own political agenda: He had just tabled a plan to bring Vector Gallery to Washington D.C. in order to “‘program” the presidential elections and cause “systemic shifts in the geopolitical configuration of power in the Middle East.”
Back-to-back demonstrations in support of Planned Parenthood brought thousands to the Village on Saturday, with some 200 Pro-Choice advocates squaring off against a scattering of abortion foes outside the Margaret Sanger Center on Bleecker Street, followed by a much larger rally in Washington Square Park.
L to R: Stelter, Polgreen, Weisberg, Echevarría, Remnick. (Photos: Daniel Maurer)
“How do you cover a beast like Donald Trump?” That question, posed by NYU journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen, was at the heart of a talk last night between New Yorker editor David Remnick and the top editors of Huffington Post, Slate, and Univision.
Lee Ranaldo and Steve Gunn, front. Georgia Hubley, back.(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
“I need a drink,” Steve Gunn said as he started into “Way Out Weather” at Rock and Roll Hotel in D.C. on Friday night. After taking a swig he added, “As I’m sure you also probably do.”
(Photo: Nicole Disser)
Shortly after the jarring election of Donald J. Trump, you might’ve seen a hilarious sketch from Saturday Night Live called The Bubble where “it’s like the election never happened.” The Bubble is a magical, if not eerily insulated, “place where the unthinkable didn’t happen and life could continue for progressive Americans just as before” because it’s “a planned community of like-minded free thinkers – and no one else.” The punchline is genius: “The Bubble: It’s Brooklyn with a bubble on it.” It’s funny because it’s true – or maybe not.
While you’re giving everyone gift subscriptions to Vanity Fair in the name of Donald Trump, you might want to check out a magazine that launched just a few days ago. It’s called DRØME (Scandinavian-stlye slashed Os are totally trending) and it has already hipped us to a short film featuring Eric Wareheim as a mutant Haribo bear.
One of Jared Kushner’s buildings, 118 East 4th Street, where tenants have taken legal action against their landlord (Photo courtesy of Streeteasy)
After months of pleading with Westminster City Living to restore cooking gas and address a litany of repairs in her aging East Village tenement building, Jennifer Hengen and other members of the 118 East 4th Street tenant association had reached their breaking point. “It was like waiting for Godot,” she recalled.
Not only had the building’s real-estate management company, headed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, neglected to fix problems in her building, and many more across the neighborhood, but tenants felt as if the problems didn’t really matter to management. “We’re invisible to them because we’re not millionaires,” she said. “I just don’t think we’re taken very seriously– number one, because we’re not in one of the big, shiny buildings and, number two, because we are rent-stabilized.”
While we count the days until WPIX airs its recently unearthed vintage yule log footage, the city’s new wifi kiosks are showing a virtual fireplace of their own. I can’t tell whether this is adorable or deplorable. After all, the lovely log is sandwiched in between ads for Abercrombie and H&M. Is it yet another instance of the once humble yule log being used as a marketing gimmick? If so, this is right up there with Donald Trump and Mike Pence invading my Facebook feed with ads for their abominable #MAGA Christmas-tree ornament. (By the way, the “Today only!” sale has been offered to me over the course of several days, which means you should never believe a word these guys say about THE HOLIDAY SEASON.) Anyway, this is definitely the least relaxing yule log ever. You can’t even hear the crackling of the flames over the cabbie who’s blasting his horn as a deliveryman yells, “Fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck.”