Writers

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J. Gabriel Boylan: Review of "The Ugly One" @sohorep by @miscelanyous for @capitalnewyork http://t.co/NESgPT4K
1 day 6 hours ago
 

Woody Allen's kind of crowd, patrons of the 92nd St. Y, pull up chairs for a nostalgia trip

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Seeing Allen at the 92nd St. Y is the closest thing Manhattan has to seeing the Pope give a blessing in St. Peter's Square. And his followers come out in droves for the pilgrimage. The event, billed as a discussion about Allen's autobiographical 1987 film Radio Days, had been sold out for weeks, but there were still a large share of people standing outside hoping to score spare tickets. Of course, as can be the case at the 92Y, the actuality didn’t quite live up to the billing, and what transpired was a pleasant, if not quite razor-sharp discussion on the topic of nostalgia. More

By Jason Diamond

February 22, 2012 5:22 pm

 

A rally against the N.Y.U. expansion plan, but this time it's students and faculty holding the signs

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"This is a moment of historical importance," said N.Y.U. professor of media, culture, and communications Mark Crispin Miller at yesterday's rally. He described a 50-year history of neighborhood protests against N.Y.U. expansion plans.

"Never before has the faculty stood with the community," he said. "We're standing with the community now."

Miller is helping to lead a new group that calls itself the NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, or NYUFASP, which was one group involved in organizing the rally. (The "Sexton Plan" is a nickname for NYU 2031, which comes from the name of its foremost proponent, university president John Sexton.) More

By Nancy Scola

February 22, 2012 3:18 pm

 

Brave new words: Writers and editors of e-publication 'The Atavist' discuss the future of long-form writing at N.Y.U.

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Though The Atavist packages its long-form journalism with an array of multimedia bells and whistles, three writers for the literary website told an audience last night at NYU that words—no matter how many—were still king. Using an iPad, the panelists projected Matt Power’s 15,000-word article on a tree kangaroo seeker in a remote Pacific Island. “There’s probably less than ten major magazine stories a year that come out of that length,” Evan Ratliff said. More

By Dan Rosenblum

February 22, 2012 12:30 pm

 

Oscar scouting report, best actor: Bichir, Clooney, Dujardin, Oldman, Pitt

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Oldman's performance does not want to be noticed or congratulated. What is so incredible about his work here is the faith that he, the actor, has in what he is doing. George Smiley is not expressive. He does not have a catharsis. He does not even have a bad temper. There are no comforting scenes in which Oldman gets to let it all hang out. Smiley is pained, and silent, and watchful. To maintain that over the course of a film, and have it add to the tension as opposed to dissipate it, is no small feat. More

By Sheila O'Malley

February 22, 2012 11:11 am

 

A new exhibit from MOMA's print collection investigates (and broadens) the meaning of the term 'print'

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"The thing is to think about print not as a mode of fabrication ... but as a mode of distribution," said curator Christophe Cherix when we spoke prior to the show's opening: in a world of ever-accelerating social and technological change, he pointed out, print can be understood to mean any system that diffuses ideas across the cultural landscape. Many of the objects in the show present not as printed pages or artist prints, but as paintings or sculpture or some other iteration, clinging to “print-ness” only by way of their means of production or theoretical conceit. More

By Ian Volner

February 22, 2012 8:43 am

 

Mayenburg's unblinking, uncompromising moral satire 'The Ugly One' is a very un-American beauty

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The fact that the play freakishly transforms the good-looking actor Alfredo Narciso into someone hideous is not so much the point. Rather, the fun—and the force—of Von Mayenburg’s deft absurdist conceit is that, with the precision of a plastic surgeon, he detaches the concept of ugliness itself from any individual human face, thus giving us an opportunity to regard ugliness, and its power, in the abstract. More

By Alena Smith

February 21, 2012 12:58 pm

 

Tweets about pandas, rappers, and dirty stuff plus sex confessions equal a Tao Lin-curated reading at St. Mark's

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The literary differences fell, maybe unsurprisingly, along gender lines. The three male readers went for laughs, joked about rappers (as though nothing could be further from their heady literary experimentalism than the black experience), and seemed cooly aloof, while the two women performed their sexuality and their awkwardness, less for laughs than for the sake of some therapeutic confessionalism. If a Muumuu House house style emerged, it was one that was very much in line with the affectless, self-concerned style of Thought Catalog: diaristic essays and Twitter poetry. And it's succeeding. Gaby Dunn, a Thought Catalog writer, scored that Times gig, while Calloway is meeting with literary agents. More

By B. Michael Payne

February 21, 2012 9:55 am

 

At PPOW Gallery, duo Martin and Munoz create delightfully dark snow scenes in miniature

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The snow globe as a cultural object is nostalgia itself, with scenes of wintry cliché that never change and where it’s always White Christmas. In the guise of a sentimental, sugar-coated terrain these landscapes disorient in their narratives of alienation and very dark humor. More

By Grace-Yvette Gemmell

February 21, 2012 9:01 am

 

The Phenomenal Handclap Band host a rousing homecoming at Nublu

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Thursday's show served as both homecoming and celebration for Handclap—their second album, Form and Control, was released this week. The group's newest recruit, yet a crucial element in their sound, Marin got her start in Portuguese-language bands after falling in love with the music of Brazil, and joined Handclap in the space between their first and second albums. “I was like, ‘Are you sure you guys want me to sing?’” Marin told me once we finally made it outside, as if she couldn’t possibly understand what a band would want with a captivating lead singer. More

By Chris Chafin

February 20, 2012 1:56 pm

 

Luck's Fortunes: How can Dustin Hoffman's Ace Rothstein help the down-and-out?

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Whenever money can’t work to change the fates of the characters, it’s up to hopefulness to intervene. As Getting’up Morning sprints to the finish, we see a Milchian cross-section of jockeys struggling with their burdens: the Cajun rider known as “Bug” trying to reverse his weight gain on a punishing running trail, and also the pill-and-booze addicted Ronnie stumbling toward the beach, paper bag in hand. One of the best filmmaking moments on the show yet comes when the thump of the race is removed from the soundtrack—we know by now that Getting’up Morning will win the race —and a string arrangement is allowed to score the rest of the victory, amidst some cross-cutting between the show’s losers. More

By Seth Colter Walls

February 20, 2012 1:39 pm

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