Capital New York

The Strand bestseller list, annotated

The Strand Bookstore, with its famous "18 Miles of New, Used, Rare and Out of Print Books," is as New York as a bookstore can get, and so naturally it seems on a summer day to be mostly tourists.

It also makes sense that several of the books on the store's bestseller list—Gary Shteyngart's brand-new Super Sad True Love Story (No. 3), Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (No. 8), Sloane Crosley's essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake (No. 9), Catcher in the Rye (No. 16), Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (No. 17), and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn (No. 19)—have little in common except that they are set in the city. More

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By Zachary Woolfe and Tom McGeveran

Hedda Gabler at home: she's a little too comfortable

Henrik Ibsen's play Hedda Gabler, about an unhappily married woman in a 19th-century Norwegian town, is set, we are told in the opening stage direction, in "a large drawing-room, well furnished, in good taste."

And, indeed, it's not in a theater, but in a room that meets all of these qualifications—the second-floor living room of a townhouse in the East Village—that a brilliantly crafted but ultimately disappointing production of the play opened on Tuesday night. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

Ballads for barflies: Ute Lemper sings Bukowski at Joe's Pub

The heir to Marlene Dietrich and Lotte Lenya, and she's now, somewhat audaciously, adding the American cult poet Charles Bukowski—the darkly funny bard of drinking and whoring and poverty who died in 1994—to the pantheon of 20th-century cabaret lyricists with a show of his poems, set to Lemper's own music. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

The St. Mark's Book Shop bestseller list, annotated

The East Village may have gotten a little fancy, but thrift still trumps literariness, if one is to measure purely by the two best-selling paperbacks at St. Mark's Bookshop, the brainy bookstore at 9th Street and Third Ave.

Two of Stieg Larsson's inescapable novels—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire—are Nos. 1 and 3 on the list, respectively. More

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By Zachary Woolfe and Tom McGeveran

Sneaking into the stockrooms at city museums

Visible storage makes possible every curator's dream: the display of more artworks than the very, very few that a museum can fit in its regular exhibition spaces. It has become ingrained enough in the New York museumgoing experience that it has itself become an artistic subject: "Visible Storage," a show of paintings of the Met's Luce Study Center by Beth Livensperger, opened yesterday at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side and runs through Sept. 26. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

Mark Morris on stodgy dance types, 'L'Allegro,' Fort Greene

As far as Mark Morris is concerned, there’s a simple reason why his 1988 dance L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has become one of his company’s signature pieces.

"Well, I like to think that it's because it's extremely good," Morris said. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

'Indie classical,' with a bad case of beautiful hair

The composer and singer William Brittelle looks like a rock star—the love child, perhaps, of Pete Wentz and Robert Pattinson. There has never been more perfectly tousled hair than his. There have never been eyes more bedroom. There has never been a smile with such a blazing flash, never been such a smolder.

Brittelle's looks are not incidental, as his performance of songs from his new album, Television Landscape, last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge proved. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

Orpheus crowdsources composers; political scholars approve

The famously conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is playing with this traditional paradigm in commissioning four composers for their 2011-12 season at Carnegie Hall. And what is being added is...you! What else, in this age of crowd-sourcing and interactivity? With Project 440, the clever name given to their search for Orpheus' Next Top Composers (440 Hz is the generally accepted concert pitch of an A tone), the orchestra is ripping the veil off of the commissioning process and turning it over to the people. Well, kind of. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

Lincoln Center's 'striptease': It's the architecture!

For Lincoln Center, which had long been an island of culture closed off to its surroundings, the renovation to Alice Tully Hull exposed the building to the street so that, as arhitect Charles Renfro said, "going to the theater becomes theater." The vocabulary that both architects kept using replaced Belluschi's masculine muscularity with a more feminine warmth and transparency—"an architectural striptease," as Renfro put it. More

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By Zachary Woolfe

Dancing in The Street: 'Mr. Clean sure is flexible!'

Yesterday, two young men, business types, were walking to lunch in the Financial District when something caught their eye.

"Mr. Clean's pretty flexible," one said to the other, laughing. He was referring to Paul-Andre Fortier, a 62-year-old dancer and choreographer from Canada who does bear a striking, if leaner, resemblance to the bald, blue-eyed, white-eyebrowed housewife-bait. More

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By Zachary Woolfe