For three years, Italian artist Andrea Mastrovito and a dozen assistants have slaved away on NYsferatu: a Symphonie of a Century, a remake of the 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu, but made out of 35,000 hand-drawn pictures. “This movie is my second wife right now,” Mastrovito told us. “We are always together, me and NYsferatu. And even if I love it, I love and hate it. NYsferatu has sucked my blood.”
At last, this Monday, the film will premiere at Pier 63.
(Photo: Rockaway Clam Bar’s Instagram)
L to R: Council Member Karen Koslowitz, Joey Ramone’s brother Mickey Leigh, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz. (Photo: Frank Mastropolo)
For Ramones fans, Forest Hills High School in Queens is as seminal a site as performance venues CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. The school is where the Ramones – Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy – first met. On Sunday, the intersection in front of the school at 67th Avenue and 110th Street was renamed The Ramones Way to honor the late pioneers of punk rock.
(Flyer via Rhythm of Afrika)
It’s rare when a music trend hits at all levels of the listener spectrum, but right now African music is resonating with everyone from pop junkies and passive, whatever’s-playing-at-the-club consumers to crate-diggers with eclectic collections and torrent combers with multiple hard drives devoted to the most obscure sounds they can find.
(photo via BAM)
Portrait of myself as my father
Continues through September 17 at BAM Fisher, 7:30 pm: $25.
Choreographer Nora Chipaumire, born in Zimbabwe and based in Brooklyn, takes the medium of traditional African dance and dresses it up in the masculine garb of a boxing ring in this piece that explores and explodes traditional notions of black masculinity through the spirit of her estranged father. He will appear in multiple forms, symbolically summoned as a “specter” through two dancers, Kaolack (also known as Senegalese dancer Pape Ibrahima Ndiaye) and the Jamaican-born Shamar Watt. The three performers will step into the ring, don their gloves, and fight it out. Or dance it out. Or maybe there’s less of a difference than we think.
The Internet has been quietly aflutter lately with a sort of drag debate: drag kings rallying for their place in the scene after RuPaul recently said kings and queens “don’t really mix”; “faux queens” or “bio-queens” asserting that their drag is as valid and subversive as other drag queens only to garner an entire response essay picking apart their argument. Though drag is indeed replete with layers and a multifaceted history, including its ongoing relationship with trans and gender non-conforming folk, Ru did classically say, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” However, one could look to the ever-growing medium of Internet Thinkpieces and get a sense that the scene is much more fragmented than that.
(via Facebook)
(Flyer via Sculpture Center)
The work-in-progress surf museum location at 1-89 Beach 96th Street. (Photo: Jimmy Brady)
Get ready to wax nostalgic.
David Selig, owner of the late, great Rockaway Taco, is working with surf instructor Fernando Pires to open a museum dedicated to the history and culture of surfing in Rockaway Beach. They’re giving a shack-like makeover to the second floor of a Victorian backhouse and stocking it with classic boards and over 500 surfing movies, magazines and memorabilia, mostly sourced from Pires’ personal collection. And that’s not all Selig is cooking up: the ground floor of the building, located on Beach 96th Street, will house a new bakery, and the adjacent tropical hideaway, The Palms, is getting a chef-driven dinner series.
Planned service changes on the J, M and Z train lines are expected to continue into early March 2016. (Photo: Karissa Gall)
A possible year-long shutdown of the L train isn’t the only transit issue causing angst as of late.
J, M service is being shut down on late nights and weekends until early March. An MTA spokesperson tells us the closure is due to switch renewal work on three switches north of the Essex Street station. Last weekend, in lieu of trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan, a free shuttle bus provided alternate, sardine-can-like service between Hewes Street and Essex Street, stopping at Marcy Avenue.