Culture | The New York Observer

cabaret

Red Hot Mama: Christine Ebersole at Café Carlyle

By Rex Reed | January 18, 2011 | 9:01 pm

Perfection is not an overused word in the cabaret world, but I use it without reservation when making even a feeble effort to describe Christine Ebersole's dynamic, touching, beautifully conceived new act at the Café Carlyle. Unencumbered by the phony titles and pointless concepts that plague other "theme" shows, she simply steps to the postage-stamp stage, splendid and glowing bright like a sunflower nourished by neon, shaking her fluffy blond coif in her above-the-knee black sleeveless dress garnished with perfectly placed pearls, opens up her heart and sings.... MORE»

movies

Goodbye, Stalin!

By Rex Reed | January 18, 2011 | 8:57 pm

Painstakingly shot, frame by frame, and with accurate writing and impeccable performances, and guided by the great Australian director Peter Weir's impressive trademark attention to detail, The Way Back saves January from the dumpster and triumphs as the first great film of... MORE»

From the Joan B. Mirviss Gallery, a circa-1800 Japanese screen

Arts Calendar

That Chippendale Moment

By Alexandra Peers | January 18, 2011 | 8:52 pm

To everything there is a season, and winter is antiques-buying season among the folks who do such things. A slew of shows, big and small, inexpensive and not, are crammed into the next few weeks. Winter Antiques Show Park Avenue Armory 67th St. & Park AvenueJan. 21-30; $20The high-society grande dame, now in its 57th year. Not cheap, the event is strong on Shaker furniture, classic American folk art, globes, gilt-edged mirrors, 18th-century clocks and the kind of tables the Founding Fathers might have supped at. ... MORE»

Vitamin A for effort: Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.

movies

Love and Other Drags

By Rex Reed | January 18, 2011 | 8:49 pm

After a string of flops, the lovely, accomplished and underappreciated Natalie Portman achieved something of a career breakthrough in the pretentious horror flick Black Swan. Now, before the impact has worn off, and on the verge of an Oscar nomination, she crumbles like a mildewed crumpet. Short of breaking into the editing lab and destroying the negative, she should have done everything legally possible to stop the ill-timed release of a vulgar, stupid pile of junk called No Strings Attached. This movie could destroy... MORE»

books

The Sentence Level: Is There Anything Real or True Between a Capital Letter and a Period?

By Joshua Cohen | January 18, 2011 | 8:47 pm

This. Is. A. Sentence. And so is this. As is anything we might cram between a majuscule, or a capital letter, and a period. Those innovations—capitalization, punctuation—were products of Carolingian manuscripture: the handwriting that appeared in the monasteries during the reign of Charlemagne.... MORE»

Art

More Couturiers to Get Met’s Star Treatment

By Rachel Corbett | January 18, 2011 | 8:40 pm

Jonathan and Elizabeth Tisch's donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art will build more than a new Costume Institute Gallery--it could canonize a new set of fashion-design superstars. Last week, the billionaire Tisches made a $10 million gift to the Met that will fund a 4,200-square-foot namesake gallery and state-of-the-art storage for the institute's 35,000-item archive, projects that have been little more than fund-raising fantasies for the Met for more than a decade. The couple's largesse, insiders said, could propel Lizzie Tisch onto the Met's tony board of... MORE»

Museums

The Loner: Edward Hopper at the Whitney

By Maika Pollack | January 18, 2011 | 8:40 pm

Edward Hopper is the quintessential painter of American loneliness. Would Hopper's characters ever have Facebook pages? What if they were checking their Twitter feed in the night cafe? Of course, it is absurd to ask these questions. His subjects seem not just like people naturally inclined to isolation but as though they were operating during a lonelier... MORE»

Galleries

Dots, Dots, Dots ... Two Shows Zero in on Our Pixellated World

By Will Heinrich | January 18, 2011 | 8:38 pm

More than 40 years ago, Jennifer Bartlett established a simple, ostensibly minimalist method of painting that she has since used to widely varied effect. On a graph-paper grid silkscreened onto baked white enamel, mounted on a square steel plate, she paints colored dots. Sometimes the dots work like pixels, building up patterns or houses or mountains or trees, and sometimes they simply accumulate. Sometimes they grow large enough to cover multiple squares, but more often each square gets its own dot.... MORE»

theater

All the Men and Women Not Mere Players

By Jesse Oxfeld | January 18, 2011 | 8:36 pm

"We have, in New York, the best actors in the world," wrote the estimable Village Voice critic Michael Feingold last week in reviewing Adam Bock's A Small... MORE»

Program

PROGRAM: What We Love This Week (January 19- January 25)

By Rachel Morgan | January 18, 2011 | 8:33 pm

ART Catch the exhibit "Untitled (Painting)," an exhibit by multiple artists, paired with Larry Clark's 64-minute black-and-white film Tulsa, 1968 at Luhring Augustine before its close on Feb. 5. The nine contemporary artists showing all exhibit a unique approach to both traditional and nontraditional methods and abstract painting. A visual smorgasbord (531 West 24th... MORE»

Opera

"Tosca" Without the Fire

By Zachary Woolfe | January 18, 2011 | 8:26 pm

For the kind of wrenching, blatantly ironic flourish that opera is known for--"You should know that was your brother you just killed"--there's really nothing that can beat the end of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca. The audience watches as dawn breaks over a prison in Rome. The year is 1800. Just a few minutes ago, we heard Scarpia, the corrupt, lecherous police chief, promise the title character, an opera diva, that Mario Cavaradossi, her condemned lover and a political prisoner, will be spared. The firing squad will have blanks in their... MORE»

Music

Suburban Geniuses: Tom Tom Club Keep Their Heads Up in Connecticut

By J. Gabriel Boylan | January 18, 2011 | 8:25 pm

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, better known as Tom Tom Club, seemed to have different ideas about why they left New York. “I was partying too hard,” Mr. Frantz told The Observer with a sigh and a so-sue-me shrug, “and I had to get that all sorted.” Ms. Weymouth frowned. “They turned the heat off after 4 p.m.!” she said, essentially dismissing Mr. Frantz’ claim. “I mean the place was great, and we loved the city, but you can’t raise kids where there’s no... MORE»

Internal Memo

Internal Memo: Mark Sanchez

By Christian Lorentzen | January 18, 2011 | 8:21 pm

I'm working on my personal brand. I don't want to be just a football player, a dumb jock who just throws balls in the air further and faster and more accurately than a few other guys (guys like Tom Brady). I want to be a whole human being. I want to have feelings, feelings that don't just have to do with beating the Patriots or the Steelers or Ben Roethlisberger or Tom Brady. I want to seem more sophisticated than a guy who makes his living standing over another guy's backside waiting for a hunk of inflated leather to be shoved into his hands.... MORE»

The Wee Hours

Chloë in the Early Morning

By Nate Freeman | January 18, 2011 | 7:34 pm

Chloë Sevigny was standing a few feet from the DJ booth, swaying in a polka-dot dress and a black beret. Sometime around midnight she had started drinking Patrón against her will. “It’s not my favorite,” she told The Observer Saturday night, talking not two centimeters from our nose. The Human League was wailing on the sound system, and the leather-and-denim-clad crowd was singing... MORE»

Shindigger

Boy on the Bus

By Michael H. Miller | January 18, 2011 | 7:33 pm

"Hello, uh, bonsoir," the director Christopher Thompson said last week at a screening of his first film, Bus Palladium, at the French Institute on 59th Street. “This is in English, right? I’m sorry I don’t sound more French. It’s always a... MORE»

Book BFFs Karen Abbott and Julia Cheiffetz Reunite for 10 Times the Pay

No Gorditas For Lolitas: Skins Too Spicy for Taco Bell

Watch Kevin Smith Rant At Sundance Before Buying His Own Movie