Look! The first ever video version of the wildly popular Web column! Today I sneaked up on fellow wWeb editor Dustin Goot, who was getting all sensual with the stirring. Note: I’m just learning how to use this camera. Another note: Yet this still probably doesn’t excuse my inability to get both the soup and Dustin’s head in the frame. Enjoy!

In his recent Toronto Film Festival post, my colleague Josh says, with the declarative hauteur typical of a critic: “If there was ever a director you wish would avoid politics at all costs and stick to the stylish nonsense, it’s Brian De Palma.” Actually for me it’s Asaad Kelada, and if anyone shares my feelings, I would like to hear from you provided you aren’t creepy. Now, on to more pressing matters. After feting the 75th anniversary of the A Train in whatever way you personally deem appropriate, you should probably go see Edward Albee, who’s speaking before a screening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But if that doesn’t Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe you’re just not a fan of raw oysters, or of eating them in the presence of Superbad’s Michael Cera at schmancy parties with lots of drapes. Neither am I, really. But I felt I owed myself some premium silliness (Toronto is growing more like Sundance every year) after being such a good boy all day. When you rise for a chilled breakfast of gender confusion (Lucia Puenzo’s deeply felt XXY) and then move on to courses of highly stylized Rembrandt biography (Peter Greenaway’s absorbing Nightwatching, starring an inspired Martin Freeman) and European deadpan misery (Roy Andersson’s You, the Living; more of the same), you ache for models to serve you champagne in the evening. Read the rest of this entry »

After serving up five films that only got better in quality, climaxing with the bizarre Argento (not scary in the slightest, but blooming as a cult oddity), the fest is suddenly a fickle mistress, a bitter harvest yielding only strangely shaped squash that taste blah and don’t even work as decorative objects. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve yet to make your big plans for Sunday afternoon, consider heading up to Riverside Park for Jewzapalooza, a daylong celebration of summer’s end presented by impresario Michael Dorf’s Oy!hoo Festival. The concert, which will be staged near the park’s 72nd St entrance, is big and free, two things we always appreciate. And the lineup includes some of the biggest names in Jewish music from across the country and around the world. Family-oriented folks will want to turn up at noon sharp for a set by Dan Zanes and Friends (pictured). The former Del Feugo is now Brooklyn’s leading purveyor of high-quality kid rock, but his roots-rockin’ past guarantees that grown-ups will find something to latch on to, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

We couldn’t get all the way through Paul Haggis’s 2004 West Coast guiltfest, Crash (okay, we shut it off after ten minutes). Fortunately, Cherry Red Productions has created a vastly more engaging version using Care Bears in lieu of sanctimonious Hollywood types. (Come to think of it, that might work for the pending screenwriters strike, too.) Note how much more palatable the Thandie Newton–fingering scene is when performed by Funshine Bear.

Aw yeah: another Toronto, another ten days of strolling on the beach with half-naked starlets, skiing the slopes during my off-hours and eating amazing barbecue. Actually, no. All of those things come from sexier festivals. Toronto, meanwhile, is 100 percent business: a ten-day event of hundreds of films, including all the biggies from Cannes, Sundance, SXSW and Venice, along with plenty of new gems, too—all presented in the context of a beautifully run affair with little aggravation or mishegas. How totally Canadian. Read the rest of this entry »

Turn that frown upside down!

Saturday at 4pm is the Art Parade, in which dozens of revelers shimmy down West Broadway from Houston to Grand Street, garbed in outrageous outfits, scathing political placards, portable sculptures, origami kites, papier-mâché heads and tableaux of all stripes. Is it pretentious and just a little bit silly? Yes—but it’s two fucking months till Halloween and we have a werewolf Giuliani costume that we’re dying to try out.

The title of this post was a potential name for the show eventually called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This and other hilarious sundries were revealed last night by Michael Palin at the 92nd Street Y.

Palin, whose book Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years went on sale this week, chatted casually with Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels about the book, shared stories from various sets and shoots, and discussed the artistic innocence of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Beyond the jump, highlights: Read the rest of this entry »

All right. Labor Day has come and gone, and with it, your “summertime haze” excuse for not already buying tickets to Eat Out ’07. Even though you may have been slacking off for a month—or longer—that’s not true for us here in the marketing department at Time Out New York. We’ve been as busy as beavers, laying the preliminary groundwork for Eat Out ‘07, which, as you may recall, is our biggest event of the year.

Of course, with something so monumental, we don’t do it alone. I’ll be the first to admit that I alone don’t possess the skills to pull off something this huge, which involves corralling 40 top-notch restaurants (and their chefs and restaurateurs) into one space for a night of dining, drinks, dancing and more. Thus, we call in the experts at Match Catering and Eventstyles, who pretty much wrote the book on producing fun, sexy food events.

This week, I decided to put my newly honed interview skills to work on our contact at Match, Erin Gitlin. To her infinite credit, she stopped working long enough to respond.

You work on a number of these types of events. What exactly is your role?
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PJ Harvey, whom we like, has her first new studio album in a few years coming this fall—possibly as soon as this month. It’s called White Chalk, which makes me think of schoolyards and corpses. The first single, “When Under Ether,” seems an odd choice to announce an album, but that’s no slight against the song itself, a piano-driven excursion into a particularly feminine dreamtime. PJ’s always been a killer live performer, which is why your fingers will want to be at the ready when tickets for her one (1) NYC show go on sale this Friday at 10am. Drummer Jim White, possibly the best in his game (that being the mercenary-percussion-assassin game), plays on White Chalk, so hopefully he’ll be onstage as well. The concert’s October 10 at Beacon Theatre and you know the routine.

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I hear that places like Morgan Stanley and the CIA foster team spirit with activities like bungee jumping, betraying your colleagues for fun, and weekend trips to black-site resorts. At TONY, we do karaoke—and we’re doing it on Broadway, baby! Read the rest of this entry »

I was just saying to someone a few weeks ago that there aren’t enough opportunities for a competitive guy like me to beat the tar out of little kids at stuff. I’d love to join a Little League team, hit bombs out to dead center and watch the demoralized opposing pitcher (preferably a ten-year-old girl) break down and cry. My opportunity for ruining young lives finally arrived, this past Labor Day weekend, at the inaugural rock-paper-scissors tournament at KeySpan Park.

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I feel for police officers, I really do. They join the force to protect the innocent against criminal predators and they end being drafted unwillingly into the gay lifestyle. Or is it really so unwillingly? Certainly Sgt. Dave Karsnia wasn’t psyched about doing the toilet-stall tango with Larry Craig. I mean, who would? But if William Friedkin’s recently rereleased homo primer, Cruising, is to be believed, the fuzz are just big burning balls of sexual confusion waiting to explode in the queer demimonde, under the guise of doing their job.

Is that what was going on at Mr. Black Friday night, when undercover officers arrested 17 staffers and 15 patrons on drug-related charges and shut down the year-old gay dance club for the foreseeable future? Probably not. According to Charles Winters of GaySocialites.com, the club was kinda asking for trouble by doing absolutely nothing to keep the party-favor-taking on the DL.

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The list of decent PlayStation 3 games grew a little bit longer this week with the release of Warhawk (by Incognito Entertainment, distributed by Sony Computer Entertainment), a slick third-person shooter that is also the subject of an interesting distribution experiment: The game can be purchased as an online download for $39.99, in addition to being available in stores for the regular PS3 game price of $59.99 (for the extra Jackson, you get a Bluetooth headset and some “additional video content” on the disc). It’s a pretty ingenious pricing scheme—it does away with the $10 price premium on “next generation” games that began when the Xbox 360 was released in November 2005, while the simultaneous retail release helps remove the stigma of slightness surrounding downloadable games on consoles. Read the rest of this entry »

If this weekend you happen to notice a sudden drop in the number of experimental-theater scenesters, it’s no surprise: Today the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival kicks off. It’s the more curated companion event to Philly’s Fringe, and it features a mouthwatering lineup of stuff you might have seen in NYC as well as things you may never see here. Most notably, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, a seven-hour uncut, verbatim theatrical rendition of The Great Gatsby. Read the rest of this entry »

^{Photo: Charlie Samuels}

The shuttered storefront at 117 Delancey Street was an otherwise forgotten Chinese restaurant that led into now-abandoned Building D of the Essex Street Market. But today, the former purveyor of cheap takeout is awaiting a delivery of its own: 70 tons of sand. It’s all part of the transformation of a desolate urban space into a work of art by the British artist Mike Nelson. Since July, Nelson has been busily preparing the former eatery (as well as rest of the old LES marketplace) for a rebirth September 8 as A Psychic Vacuum, the latest of the artist’s installations informed by his reading and experiences. Viewers will move through the old Chinese restaurant into a series of disorienting hallways that mix original elements (decades’ worth of peeling paint) with touches Nelson has added (the sound of one’s foot against the floor has even been controlled). This ambitious project (instigated by former Creative Time curator and producer Peter Eleey) complicates Nelson’s usual method of converting galleries by giving him work in a place that’s so full of history, it will be hard to determine what’s been there all along and what the artist has brought in. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s fucking killer. If you thought it was wild, or cool, or darn interesting that he used a Daft Punk track for “Stronger,” wait till you hear “Drunk and Hot Girls,” for which he went one nation east and 35 years back. Everyone’s favorite egomaniac-with-a-purpose is on a three-hot-albums run, something almost unheard-of in hip-hop. Graduation comes out on September 11, which is also the release date for 50 Cent’s Curtis, which oddly enough is not being played in advance for press (Kanye’s was, to a crowd of a few hundred, and it got a rapturous response). We know what it means when they do that with new movies, but with music—ah, I’m sure it’s a great record, really.