When I was younger, I would feel an electric charge of excitement in anticipation of a concert. Now that I see an average of 3 or 4 concerts a week, there's little time for that excitement to build up. Some concerts actually just feel like a fix to feed my crazy, crazy addiction.

By the time I got to Mercury Lounge last night, I was starting to feel that rare energetic surge of excitement. My friend and I had just witnessed a less than spectacular performance by Fiery Furnaces at the East River Amphitheater, and were looking to finish our Thursday night with something a bit more memorable.

After a short wait outside, with a group of overly-excited/obnoxious guys, we worked our way into the venue, through the narrow hallway alongside the bar, and into the performance space. Gentleman Reg was on stage, and our initial reaction was negative, but by the time we settled into a spot right up front, his performance became much more satisfying. But we were there for one reason, Broken Social Scene.

Continue reading "Broken Social Scene Finds The Magic At Mercury Lounge"

Photos by Jonny-Leather

If you live in Brooklyn and haven’t adopted some sugar-free (or vegan) diet, then you should have heard of Cake Man Raven and his famous red velvet cake.  Well, he wants you loyal sweet fiends to know he appreciates your business and this Sunday the Fort Greene shop will host Eighth Annual Family & Friends Appreciation Day. Get ready for a cupcake parade at 3 p.m. and live music on the festival stage at 4 p.m. (located at South Oxford and Hanson Place).  The Cake Man has promised stilt walkers, marching bands, giant slides and the possible celebrity cameo (maybe one of the famous people who love his cake like Patti LaBelle or Spike Lee will appear).

Originally from Harlem, Raven Patrick De'Sean Dennis III, got his nickname when a reporter referred to him as “Harlem Cake Man Raven” in 1991.  The title stuck and followed him all the way to Brooklyn where I have heard people ask in an excited tone as they point to the red cake with white creamy icing, “Is that from Cake Man Raven?”  And a lot of the time, it is.

Sun. July 20, 3 p.m., 708 Fulton Street (at Greene Ave.) 718-694-2253

Don’t hate on Jason Jeffries. He wants to close down Bedford Avenue—but it’s only for your own good. Jeffries is the architect behind Williamsburg Walks, an event that will close a stretch of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn for four Saturdays this summer, beginning this weekend. And, according to Jeffries, this is the best way to build community in the nabe.

Yes, you read that right, no taxis, no cars aiming for folks on crosswalks: Starting July 19 and continuing for four consecutive Saturdays, Bedford Avenue from Metropolitan to North 9th Street will be closed to cars and buses will be re-routed. Other businesses in the same area, from Roebling Street to the waterfront, will be allowed to set up tables outside their shops...

Continue reading "Car-Free Bedford" here.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” will ring out in Red Hook this Saturday, July 19, when Jess Winfield performs 31 condensed plays by Shakespeare. If he manages to complete his task, he will set the record for the most Shakespeare plays performed solo in Brooklyn in a day. This isn’t Winfield’s first time dabbling in condensed Shakespeare. He is the founding member of the Reduced Shakespeare Company in California, a theater company that abridged all of Shakespeare’s plays into a two-hour performance. Though he, as he put it, “hung up his tights” in 1992, Winfield’s obsession with the playwright hasn’t died down.

The performance Saturday will help promote Winfield’s new book, My Name is Will, a story about a young Shakespeare scholar (named Willie Shakespeare Greenberg) tripping on mushrooms. The plays will take place in various spots, mostly in Red Hook, and each has a theme. The only non-Brooklyn location starts the show at 2 p.m. during the 20-minute Water Taxi ride from Pier 11 in Manhattan where he will tackle 16 comedies. B61 Bar features Hamlet and you can get more of Julius Caesar at the Brooklyn Ice House. More locations can be found on the Freebird bookstore, where the performance ends and you can party down like it’s 1599.

Though diminutive actor Leslie Jordan may be best known for his Emmy-winning recurring role as Beverly Leslie on Will and Grace, he's probably better loved by the obsessed fans of Del Shores' 2001 cult classic flick, Sordid Lives. Happily for anyone who's ever been charmed by Jordan's portrayal of Brother Boy, institutionalized by his family in Texas for being a gay man with a proclivity for dressing in drag and lip syncing to Tammy Faye songs, he's very much present in the new Logo television series based on the film...

Continue readinig "Sordid Lives" here.

Last night I checked out Taylor Mac's performance at HERE, The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac, which he is performing in rep with his other one-man show, The Young Ladies of... As I work on what I want to write about the performance, I thought this video of Taylor performing "The Palace of the End," an epic love song about Lynne Cheney and Saddam Hussein which is included in Be(a)st, would be a good way of cheering us all up while we sit in offices while our lucky pals are out at the beach.

The Nation magazine has just sent out a press release touting a "new sex column" to appear in the magazine beginning next month.  The magazine is calling the column "Carnal Knowledge," an extremely witty spin on the title of the 1971 movie, "Carnal Knowledge." The column will be written by JoAnn Wypijewski (pictured left), whose sex column credentials include years of freelancing for Mother Jones, Legal Affairs and New Labor Forum...

Continue reading "The Nation's Sex Column" here.

Perhaps the editors of Entertainment Weekly have been too busy working on their not-well-received re-design. How else to explain the "Writers Gone Wild!" antics going on in last week's issue: the ever inane "The Shaw Report" declaring that "H" is in, "W" is five minutes ago, and "V" is out (your guess is as good as mine); the increasingly useless Diablo Cody inexplicably schilling for Universal's Land Of The Lost, without mentioning or even better communicating why we should care about what Diablo Cody has to say about a movie that's still a year away from release, on which she didn't work; but it is Margeaux Watson who has gone wildest, railing against Hollywood for casting Charlize Theron as Will Smith's love interest in Hancock, floating absurd notions such as "imagine how refreshing Hancock would have been if Theron's heroine had been played by a black actress." Having imagined it, it doesn't seem at all refreshing – seeing Will Smith act opposite his first Caucasian love interest, on the other hand, is quite refreshing...

Continue reading "Hating Margeaux Watson" here.

In the battle between beauty and the geek, chalk one up for the geek. They proved themselves to be the most dedicated at Tuesday’s Times Talk with Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan. The audience for the long ago sold-out discussion on The Dark Knight was comprised roughly equally of ComiCon-worthy nerds and well-dressed professional women and gays. However, with the exception of one comic-loving and intensely nervous girl, it was all male Batman diehards who lined up when the audience was invited to ask questions.

Continue reading "Geek Squad" here.

Armond White always sparks some controversy with his take on films. This week's review of the hyper-hyped The Dark Knight may exceed his usual ability to evoke vitriol. As of now there are 297 comments on the posting at Rottentomatoes (we at New York Press are still free from the tyranny of the anonymous hate-filled screeds of commenters—but not for long). And this is by people who haven't even SEEN THE MOVIE! Just wait until they skip work on Friday to sit in a dark theater on a bright and shiny summer day to wallow in Gotham's superhero muck.

I did see the film on Tuesday night at an IMAX screening and left with a terrible headache...

Continue reading "Don't Hate on Superheroes" here.

Let’s get one thing straight—I like Ratatat.  Their ’80s-style disco-electronic music that loops like some sort of endless head nodding, arm-in-the-air-bouncing trance, really moves me.  Seeing them live at the Music Hall of Williamsburg last night did not.  I knew the band was popular in the hipster music scene, I knew the show was sold out in the hipster capital of the world, but I didn’t know that Evan Mast and Mike Stroud (along with another guy donning a large Afro) were the ultimate hipster musicians...

Continue reading "Ratatat" here.

As an aspiring writer in my teens, I used a number of teen websites to create a network of other young amateurs, among which I found a crop of male erotica writers who, unsurprisingly, were the easiest to befriend. For months my adolescent mind found excitement and titillation in the honest fantasies of my peers as we weaved together through puberty. I thought myself particularly avant-garde, answering questions about female desires as a matter of research, and correcting grammar on essays about dreams that left the writers' sheets covered in sweat or worse. I was a privileged insider – until I became a subject. Reading the fantasies of a complete stranger was one thing, but fantasies about me were quite another. I backpedaled out of my oh-so-iconoclast image faster than you could say O-face, and never quite thought to mix literature and sex so intimately again.

Last month, I realized that I have by now lost the heeby-jeebies associated with pervy little boys. The time had come to dig my hands into the wide world of New York erotica that awaited spread-eagle at the appropriately named Happy Ending lounge at Rachel Kramer Bussel's "In the Flesh Erotica Series: LGBT Night." The next one takes place tomorrow (with free candy and cupcakes),  and although it won't  highlight girl-on-girl action in particular, it's sure  to expose plenty of kinky secrets...

Continue reading "In the Flesh" here.

Photo by Stacie Joy

A couple weeks ago singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson played at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.  During the show, I stepped outside with my friend as a gaggle of 17-year-old kids came out to smoke. We had seen them earlier when a drunken hula-hooping girl attempted to bum cigarettes and hold a hooping contest.  They were flustered as they excitedly explained their recent encounter with hula-hoop girl.  “And then, Kimya told that girl to be quiet, and it was so cool!” one boy gushed.  I told Dawson this and she just laughed and knew exactly whom I was talking about.  Turns out not only did she tell her to “be quiet” and respect the artist who was paying homage to his dead friend. But, when the girl refused to do so, the wild haired, plump, and pretty veteran member of Moldy Peaches had her kicked out...

Continue reading "Kimya Dawson" here.

I got to Nublu just in time for sound check and there was Jihae looking sexy as ever. The scene looked like a video shoot with a dude right in front of her face filming seduction wrapped in a white tank and black vest. 

Like a female Thom Yorke, she crooned and sighed her way through the airy music. The evening was comprised of two sets -- the first being songs from the remix EP "Afterthought" and the second set songs from her upcoming EP.

A cover of Nina Simone's "Do I Move You?" was included in the first set and proved to be the standout performance—with the electronic beats moving, grooving and thrilling all at once...

Continue reading "Jihae" here.

Allan D. Hasty is considered by some to be a cultural shepherd. Subversive in the Warhol sense, Hasty has tackled issues in his works ranging from sexual exploitation to violence, power, insecurity and fear. In his latest exhibition, I Want Candy at The Proposition gallery, he takes on the theme of commercialized branding and turns it on its ear by making the connection between the drug trade and corporate marketing schemes.

Just as Madison Avenue is filled with executives in boardrooms fine-tuning the most important aspects of branding product, Hasty turns to the little plastic baggies used to distribute drugs to convey his idea of advertising...

Continue reading "Allan D. Hasty" here.

Club Exit in Greenpoint, Brooklyn is a strange venue for some of the nastiest punk acts to play. The décor is bourgeois-fancy and the walls and ceiling are decorated with what Matt from Matt and Kim called “French fries and mushrooms.” But the whole night was about juxtapositions: old punk bands with new ones and “real” punks with Mohawks and studded belts mixed with young underage Brooklyn “hipsters.” But somehow- it worked.

Sunday night was the last night of the almost month-long F! Yeah Fest that has been touring the country. The idea was simple: put a bunch of bands together in a bus running on vegetable oil and see what happens. What they did was fall in punk music love with each other...

Continue reading "F! Yeah Fest" here.

With The Dark Knight just days away from making some serious cash money and the critical praise reaching a fever pitch thanks to Heath Ledger's newfound martyrdom, amongst other things (who knows: It may even be a good film!), I figured it's time to play devil's advocate and argue my case against Nolan's take on Batman and for Tim Burton's initial stab at the character.

Continue reading "Batman Rules" here.

Beginning the batch of three films I'd see this past weekend at Lincoln Center's William Holden: A Different Kind of Hero retrospective with Blake Edwards' S.O.B. (1981) was not a good idea. Edwards' anti-Hollywood rant is not a bad film; in fact, if not for its protracted soggy ending, it might have been a great one, on par with Edwards' first two or three Pink Panther films or Victor/Victoria (1982), his last great film. It just doesn't have very much William Holden in it.

Continue reading "William Holding" here.

I was 11 years old when I first heard The Breeders. That was back when MTV played music videos, and "Cannonball" was in heavy rotation. I knew nothing about The Pixies at the time. I just really liked the song "Cannonball." Over time I'd become obsessed with the entire album, "Last Splash," which my cool older brother taped for me. Songs like "Divine Hammer," "Saints" and "Hag" became part of my mid '90s daily appetite.

Well over a decade later, my musical tastes have grown, I've become more than familiar with the greatness of The Pixies, and I've never stopped listening to "Last Splash." It's likely to remain one of those records that simply never grows old.

Having since essentially grown into alternative rock legends, The Breeders packed McCarren Pool on Sunday for 2008's 3rd installment of the free JellyNYC Pool Parties...

Continue reading "Sunday At The Pool with The Breeders"

Photos by Jonny-Leather

No Age’s exodus out of the L.A. Smell scene into the larger taste-made universe is even more auspicious for the fact that their sound is more timeless than timely. When everyone else is busy dabbling in afro-clash and new kinds of irony, the duo opts to iron punk’s ragged remains and cut out a few patches. While they keep a white-noise board on hand, the static breakdowns are more transitional than compositional, a cowry of cultural currency that doesn’t necessarily need to be there, even if it makes the band look cooler...

Continue reading "No Pain, No Age" here.