If the city can use eminent domain to take away people’s houses to build a stadium in Brooklyn, why can’t it use it to save an 1837 town house that the owners are allowing to fall part? This was a viable building in the 80s.
The Merchant’s House, on the left, is well worth a visit for anyone interested in NYC and historic houses.
·
Susan Sontag has died, aged 71. She was born in here in New York, and died here.
She was one of the only “public intellectuals” I regularly encountered in New York, as she was someone, as James and I are, voraciously interested in art of all kinds, especially when it was new, or rare. I would see her at a BAM performance of Frankfurt Ballet, or at an obscure play in the East Village, or at an art exhibit related to the siege of Sarajevo at the New York Kunsthalle on East 5th Street.
We have one signed book of hers, but I will let James tell that story.
·
I’m moving our blogs to a new version of the blog software and putting them back at Pair so that I don’t risk breaking our blogs when doing updates to the server hosting ArtCat and ArtCal.
So, you may see some occasional problems until everything comes over and the whole internet sees the right server…
P.S. You can now use bloggy.com without the added /mt/ as the home page for my site.
·
He has achieved fame in the print media. He is one of twelve art bloggers in a write-up in the January Art in America. Joy Garnett (another of them) has the details.
·
I have written before about Jay Blotcher being fired as a stringer for the New York Times because he did media relations with ACT UP over ten years ago. Here is a coda. The person that followed him in that job — I won’t give his name but you know who I mean if you’re familiar with ACT UP — has been freelancing for the City and Escapes sections for five years. He continues to work for the Times.
·
Click on the image for the rest.
·
Awesome. All 15 minutes, with choreography, as stop-action Lego animation.
You can download it for safe-keeping. It’s the link that says Tï¿œlï¿œcharger la vidï¿œo.
·
I’m not making this up. I have to quote the whole article.
The Social Security Administration is refusing to recognize any marriage – straight or gay – performed in New Paltz, New York.
The tiny hamlet north of Manhattan burst onto the national scene in February when its mayor followed San Francisco in allowing gays to marry. New Paltz officials are now under a court imposed ban on conducting gay marriages, but the federal government is taking no chances.
A temporary directive from the Social Security Administration not to accept any marriage certificates issued in New Paltz as identification has now been made permanent.
The move came as a shock to one straight couple in the town. Susie Kilpatrick Wilkening recently married Jeremy Wilkening, but when she went to the Social Security office in Kingston, New York to get her surname changed to Wilkening she was told the federal government would not accept her marriage.
“I presented my marriage certificate, and I was told that it was not an acceptable form of ID because it was from New Paltz,” she told the Daily Freeman newspaper.
A spokesperson for the administration said that the policy began with the State of New York.
“The state has said that it does not consider (any marriage certificates issued in New Paltz) legal documents, so we are waiting until all of the legal issues on the state level are resolved,” Jane Zanca told the Freeman.
But, officials at the New York Department of State, which maintains all state records, also said they had nothing to do with the Social Security policy.
Last February when San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples Social Security instructed its offices nationwide not to accept any marriage certificates from San Francisco as proof of identification.
·
Bill Viola
The death of Tristan, from Tristan und Isolde
2004
Disney Hall, Los Angeles
artnet has a feature on The Tristan Project, based on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde involving director Peter Sellars, Los Angeles Philharmonic’s musical director Esa Pekka Salonen and the new artistic director of the Paris Opera, Gerard Mortier.
There are some great stills of the video work on the web site.
For those wondering what my favorite recording of the work is, it’s this one, recorded “live” (see the explanation on the Amazon page) at the 1966 Bayreuth Festival with Karl Böhm conducting, Birgit Nilsson as Isolde, Wolfgang Windgassen as Tristan, and Christa Ludwig as Brangäne. It is dazzling. I would love to see a film of what it looked like. It was one of the revolutionary minimalist productions by Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson. If more people knew about his work, they wouldn’t be quite so ready to hail Robert Wilson as an innovative genius.
Orchestrally, this Bernstein recording is pretty fascinating too. I haven’t heard this Barenboim one, but it’s on its way in the mail and I’ll get to listen to it soon. We probably have at least 5 recordings of the opera already. I love it so much my web consulting company is called Tristan Media.
If you are an opera (and other classical music) fanatic like me, my favorite weblog for that subject is the DC-based ionarts. The site also covers a lot of other performing arts, plus visual arts, architecture, and interesting antiquities news.
[image from artnet
·
The web site just says “Coming Soon,” but I have a flyer for the opening event.
·