Emil Nolde, Der Prophet, 1912

from The New York Times

Times Square’s Homeless Holdout, Not Budging

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

 

Heavy, as he is known, is said to be the only person still living on the streets of Times Square.

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: March 29, 2010

As long as there have been homeless people sleeping in Times Square, there have been social workers and city officials trying to persuade them to leave.

In the past, the homeless were offered a free ride to one of the city’s warehouselike shelters. These days, workers for nonprofit groups help people move into apartments, keeping track as the number of the chronically homeless in Times Square goes down.

According to their records, by 2005, there were only 55. Last summer, it was down to 7.

Now there is one.

His name is Heavy, and he has lived on the streets of Times Square for decades. Day after day, he has politely declined offers of housing, explaining that he is a protector of the neighborhood and cannot possibly leave, the workers who visit him every day said.

Yet they are determined to get through to Heavy, the last homeless holdout in Times Square.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from Prospect Magazine

Have you got erotic capital?

CATHERINE HAKIM

It can be just as valuable as a university degree—especially for women

Katie Price, aka Jordan, does not owe her astonishing success to university

---

Michelle and Barack Obama have it. Carla Bruni and David Beckham have it. Jordan has even made a career from it. So great is the advantage “erotic capital” can bring to the labour market—especially in sport, the arts, media and advertising—that it often outweighs educational qualifications.It’s a term I coined to refer to a nebulous but crucial combination of physical and social attractiveness. Properly understood, erotic capital is what economists call a “personal asset,” ready to take its place alongside economic, cultural, human and social capital. It is just (if not more) as important for social mobility and success.

Erotic capital goes beyond beauty to include sex appeal, charm and social skills, physical fitness and liveliness, sexual competence and skills in self-presentation, such as face-painting, hairstyles, clothing and all the other arts of self-adornment. Most studies capture only one facet of it: photographs measure beauty or sex appeal, psychologists measure confidence and social skills, sex researchers ask about seduction skills and numbers of partners. Yet women have long excelled at such arts: that’s why they tend to be more dressed up than men at parties. They make more effort to develop the “soft skills” of charm, empathy, persuasion, deploying emotional intelligence and “emotional labour.” Indeed, the final element of erotic capital is unique to women: bearing children.

[ click to continue reading at Prospect ]

from TIME Magazine

Behind the Home-Butchering Craze

By JOSH OZERSKY

 The thud of heavy knives bashing bones, the splat of dead muscle hitting the table, the twisting of heads off bodies and the ripping of flesh from limp, cold limbs. Is this a nightmare vision from the makers of Saw or Hostel? An autopsy? No, it’s actually the scene at a home kitchen near you, as more and more young Americans are taking a DIY approach to meat. It’s part home economics, part politics and certainly at least part fad. But it’s changing the way many Americans approach meat, chop by succulent chop.

(See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)

Many of the young pioneers of this latest culinary trend may not even realize that butchers, like milkmen and iceboxes, were a mainstay of American culture for most of our history. The rise of supermarkets in the 1960s and ’70s, and the general decline of the blue-collar trades throughout the postwar years, contributed to the near extinction of the retail butcher — that gruff but lovable lug in a white apron who stood behind a counter and cut up chops for your dinner, and whom you knew as well as your baker and, yes, your banker. Butchers mattered in people’s lives, because they were part of the food supply. And they’re not coming back.

(See pictures of gourmet food trucks.)

But the service they provided is, thanks to recession economics and a very of-the-moment mood for getting engaged with how and what you eat. At specialty shops like Brooklyn’s Meat Hook, hipster parents and earnest “gastronauts” attend cult butcher Tom Mylan’s weekly lessons in how to cut up animals.

[ click to continue reading at TIME.com ]

from the NY Daily News

[ click to view full slideshow of Kandinsky at NYDailyNews.com ]

from The New York Times

 

[ click to read The Week Ahead blog in the NY Times ]

from The LA Times

Sockeye salmon with green garlic, fava beans

Sockeye salmon with green garlic is a lovely and deeply colorful dish that tastes grand. (Los Angeles Times/Kirk McKoy)

[ click for full recipe at LATimes.com ]

from NPR.org

NBA Star Shaq Attacks Art World

Basketball star Shaquille O’Neal has forayed into the art world as the curator of the exhibit “Size DOES Matter,” on view at New York City’s FLAG Art Foundation through May 27.

The exhibition, which explores the concept of size through art, features pieces such as Ron Mueck’s “Big Man” sculpture and tiny versions of O’Neal and the Obama family in the eye of a needle, conceived by artist Willard Wigan. Other artists represented include Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton, Corban Walker and Cindy Sherman.

Stephanie Roach, director of the FLAG Art Foundation, says O’Neal was selected to curate the exhibit because he represents “size not only physically but in terms of how he views life.”

[ click to read at NPR.org ]

from The New York Times

A 12-Hour Play, and Endless Bragging Rights

By PATRICK HEALY

Every theater season has its must-must-must-see show, the snob hit that separates the true sophisticates (at least in their own minds) from the cultural chaff. New York will have a doozy of a contender this July: a 12-hour production of a grim Dostoyevsky novel that will be performed only twice, in Italian (with English supertitles), in a warehouse on Governors Island, reachable only after a ferry trip and a 20-minute walk.

Golf carts will be available for patrons who want to avoid the hike; otherwise, comfort-food theater this is not.

Nor will the show, “The Demons,” be an easy ticket, setting the stage for I-was-there bragging rights that a certain brand of New Yorker finds irresistible.

Among those who quickly bought tickets on Wednesday was David Coats, a member of the Friends of Lincoln Center. He’s a theater director in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who is a fan of the Dostoyevsky novel and of the production’s director, the German auteur Peter Stein, and an even bigger fan of what he called theater as an adventure. Mr. Coats said on Thursday that he relished the idea of trekking out to Governors Island and testing his stamina with the marathon performance (which will be broken up by meal and bathroom breaks).

In Mr. Coats’s view “The Demons” will be a relief from the onslaught of films, music and television shows that clutter American culture. “This will be like going on an adventurous foreign trip without needing a passport,” said Mr. Coats, who will attend with his wife, Alma Becker, a guest artist at Skidmore College. “We’ve been to Berlin and just missed a Stein production there. We were in Moscow and just missed Stein there. Our colleagues and other theater people have spoken so highly of Stein, so we want in on the conversation.”

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from Uncommon Nonsense

Dali’s Adventures In Wonderland

   Posted by: Kenneth Rougeau   

Surrealist Salvador Dali was certainly one of the most influential & well known painters of the 20th century, but it’s not so widely known that he was also a gifted filmmaker, photographer, writer and illustrator. Eccentric by nature, it is no surprise that Dali was drawn to creating works to illustrate stories that touched upon his own surrealistic sensibilities, such tales as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Macbeth, and of course Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland.

Dali created a series of 13 lithographs depicting Alice’s adventures (published in 1969 by Press-Random House), each vibrant and bizarre with a dreamy, almost child-like splatter-art feel to them, a bit like Ralph Steadman without the psychotic edginess (I love Ralph’s work). Alice, depicted as a girl jumping rope, is shown in each colorful image of the series as she travels through a dreamlike world of nonsense populated by an unusual cast of unlikely characters.

[ click for more reading and lithos at Uncommon Nonsense ]