Print Edition - February 22, 2011
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By The Editors | February 15, 2011 | 8:21 pm
Readers of this page know that we care passionately about the finances of the State of New York. And we're not alone, of course. Our colleagues in the media have expressed their anxieties and their own formulas for recovery in recent weeks. Governor Andrew Cuomo has been nothing but candid about his own concerns. New York voters are getting the message: The old ways cannot continue, and we need to figure out a new... MORE >
By Jenna Sauers | February 15, 2011 | 8:25 pm
"Last time we were here, André said something that sort of stuck out to me," said Shala Monroque, on the wintry eve of Fashion Week. "He said, 'When I came to New York, I was very superficial. But it was O.K. to be superficial, because I had the brains behind it.'" Ms. Monroque and André Leon Talley, the Vogue editor, were welcoming guests to a long, narrow room, a room made to seem less... MORE >
After losing a villa in Budapest, being imprisoned by both Germans and Russians, and immigrating to New York, Tibor de Nagy, with John Bernard Myers, founded a marionette company. It failed as a marionette company but reemerged, in 1950, as the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In honor of its 60th anniversary this year, the gallery, which was also a center for the New York School of poets, has mounted a copious but deftly balanced... MORE >
By The Editors | February 15, 2011 | 8:23 pm
While the city's economy is showing signs of life, the real estate community knows all too well that property values remain far below what they were at the height of the market more than two years ago. It's estimated that on a per-square-foot basis, property values have fallen by 38 percent compared with the pre-crash days of... MORE >
When you arrive to see a play called Interviewing the Audience, you expect that there will be something metaphoric or something ironic, something somehow deep and significant buried in that straightforward titular gerund. You expect that you will see something insightful and revealing, something that asks some questions of theatergoers and transforms their responses with performative... MORE >
By The Editors | February 15, 2011 | 8:21 pm
The unions representing rank-and-file firefighters and police officers are none too pleased with Mayor Bloomberg these days, and perhaps that's to be expected. The mayor wants to eliminate a $12,000 bonus paid out to about 50,000 retirees every year at the end of December. Union leaders Stephen Cassidy of the Uniformed Firefighters Association and Patrick Lynch of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association held a news conference to condemn the plan and Mr. Bloomberg's characterization of... MORE >
By Benjamin Phelan | February 15, 2011 | 5:58 pm
"You asked me to write you a letter about my proposed book on nomads," Bruce Chatwin wrote an interested publisher in 1969. He was 28 years old, and it would be eight years before his remarkable books, beginning with In Patagonia, would start to appear. "The question I will try to answer is, 'Why do men wander rather than sit... MORE >
By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi | February 15, 2011 | 7:56 pm
Among other revenants, the ghost of Satyajit Ray haunts what one might call Indian independent cinema. At two recent festivals in New York, the Bengali auteur was very much in attendance: in Autograph, a Bengali film about a fictitious project to remake Ray's Nayak (1966); in Charulata ... a Sequel ...... MORE >
By Alexander Provan | February 15, 2011 | 7:54 pm
The worlds of art and food share a paradoxical passion for authenticity and celebrity, aesthetic novelty and rarefied sensations--the stuff of art-fair-vacation weekends. The artist-chef collaboration epitomizes this young marriage. And who better to whet the tongues of collectors and connoisseurs than the so-called godmother of performance art, Marina... MORE >
By Emily Witt | February 15, 2011 | 8:27 pm
Pliers! Hard drives! Midnight dumping! North Face jackets! Electronic evidence of the destruction of electronic evidence! As most of New York ate up the more cinematic details of the latest chapter in the federal government's insider trading probe, more than a few interested parties in the hedge fund corridor from Wall Street to Stamford were starting to wonder where the investigation will go from here. One thing came through very clearly at the flow-chart-riddled... MORE >
Who am "I"? And why do "I" have to be one person? Is it just because the letter "I" looks like the number "1"? Too many people are devoted to their own singularity. "I" am not a monad. Or should "I" say, "I" are not a monad. Or should "I" say, "I" are "we" are "James Franco." The principle components of "James Franco"... MORE >
By
Rex Reed | February 15, 2011 | 8:26 pm
A fine actor who has played everyone from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Kinsey with great acclaim, Liam Neeson seems to have embarked on a new career of making one cheesy bomb after another. Maybe he's bored. Maybe he just wants to soak up the money and throw in the bath mat. Maybe he needs to give up the notion of being a movie star and return to the stage. Maybe he needs a new... MORE >
By
Rex Reed | February 15, 2011 | 8:35 pm
Vanishing on 7th Street is the latest cryptic pseudo-sci-fi hologram by shockmeister Brad Anderson (The Machinist), a director more interested in effects than the reasons for them. It begins in a movie multiplex where a lonely projectionist (John Leguizamo) is rolling spools of film through a lens darkly when the cinema goes totally black. Roaming through the seats, he discovers that the audience has vanished, leaving their coats and popcorn in the empty seats.... MORE >
By
Rex Reed | February 15, 2011 | 8:29 pm
In the bank robbery business, a "wheel man" is a skilled driver of getaway cars whose services are in great demand. An uneven but surprisingly pleasing and often entertaining low-budget indie-prod called The Chaperone is about an accidental wheel man named Ray Bradstone who lost his freedom, family and self-respect in a heist that landed him seven years in prison. Now he's out and determined to make amends, pay his debt to society and... MORE >
By Maika Pollack | February 15, 2011 | 7:53 pm
One of the many enjoyable things about some of Paul Cézanne's paintings is that they seem unfinished. They are manifestly slowly made, yet patches of bare canvas show through oil paint; the painted backgrounds don't quite meet the edge of the frame. Two series, the card players and the smokers, are the focus of a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that echoes some of the diligent and determined yet unconcernedly incomplete... MORE >
