NYC Events,”Only the Best” (02/03) + Today’s Featured Pub (Greenwich Village)

Posted on 02/03/2018 by GregD

Today’s Super 7 NYC Events > SATURDAY/ FEBRUARY 03, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

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Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society
Columbia University, Miller Theatre / 8PM, $20–$35
“The paranoid style in American politics has done pretty well by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. In his long-form masterpiece Real Enemies, from 2016, the composer-conductor and his heavy-duty 18-piece jazz orchestra contemplated such conspiracy theories as Soviet infiltration, numerology, and the ontological unlikelihood of Dick Cheney. Earlier, Brooklyn Babylon reimagined the borough in its entire multiethnic splendor, while Infernal Machines envisioned the big-band tradition as bedazzled steampunk pop. Argue’s hot, dense compositional palette includes minimalism, dodecaphony, and rock, among more traditional jazz touchstones, and he’ll probably drop a little of everything into this concert. Its centerpiece, though, will consist of Tensile Curves, a 40-minute work inspired by Duke Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue as legendarily performed at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival.” (Richard Gehr, VillageVoice)

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6 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)
>> New York City Ballet
>> DAVID MURRAY QUARTET
>> Losers Lounge: Tribute to Barbra Streisand
>> Jamison Ross
>>ShakesBEER
>> Target First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum:
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Music, Dance, Performing Arts

New York City Ballet
NYS Theater, Lincoln Center / 8PM, $30+
Today: All Balanchine No. 2
Divertimento No. 15
The Four Temperaments
Chaconne
“Out of Balanchine’s deep archive, these three pure dance treasures emerge to illustrate his ability to create whole worlds without using scenery or story. From regal courts to hushed expanses, sparkling classicism to commanding modernity, these works conjure narratives and settings in the imagination through their costuming, music, and movement.”

DAVID MURRAY QUARTET
at Birdland / 8:30 and 11PM, $40
“Mr. Murray, one of jazz’s most potent and prolific tenor saxophonists, was the wunderkind of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s and ’80s. Now, after a long hiatus in Europe, he is again living in the city. As it happens, he never stopped making vital, bridling music at the cusp of postbop and free jazz. This month he will release an album, “Blues for Memo,” featuring an all-star quartet, as well as cutting poetic commentary from Saul Williams. Here he performs with Jaribu Shahid on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, both of whom are on the album, as well as the iconoclastic pianist Lafayette Gilchrist.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Losers Lounge: Tribute to Barbra Streisand (Feb.01-03)
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater / 7pm, 9:30pm; $30
The celebrated, stalwart NYC covers act turns its collective hand to the oeuvre of the one and only Barbra Streisand. Thanks to her last studio album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, Streisand is the only artist in history to have Billboard chart–topping records in six separate decades, so the Losers will have no shortage of material to work with.” (TONY)

Jamison Ross (Feb.02-04)
The Jazz Standard / 7:30PM, 9:30PM, $30
“The winner of the 2012 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition for the drums, Jamison Ross continues his graceful, gradual transition as a top-flight jazz singer on his excellent second full-length for Concord, All for One. The 29-year-old cites the 1964 Marvin Gaye LP When I’m Alone I Cry as a key influence here, but it’s his current home of New Orleans that ultimately proves to be the creative beacon for this collection of cool covers and poignant originals.

Renditions of Alan Toussaint’s 1966 hit for Lee Dorsey (“A Mellow Time”) and the 1993 Willie Tee single that serves as the title cut emit a sweet, soulful sentiment — something at the intersection of Donny Hathaway and the Neville Brothers. Nods to such early-twentieth-century greats as Kurt Weill (“My Ship”) and Fats Waller (“Let’s Sing Again”) add further credence to Ross’s growth as a singer and bandleader beyond the drumstand. If you’re a fan of the bold paths vocal jazz is taking in 2018, you should make a point to see Ross during his four-night stand at the Standard.” (Ron Hart, Village Voice)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

ShakesBEER
The Dubliner / 3pm; $49 (includes four drinks)
“To drink or not to drink? That is the question at New York Shakespeare Exchange’s epic pub crawl, which hits the proverbial stage at four bars in the Financial District. In this Irish-themed edition, the Bard-meets-booze affair kicks off at the Dubliner before heading to Bavaria Bierhaus, Beckett’s and Route 66; at each stop, redeem one of four drink tickets for beer or wine while a cast performs scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Pericles, The Merry Wives of Windsor and George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance.” (TONY)

Elsewhere, but this monthly event is always worth the detour:

Target First Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum: Black History Month
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway (Washington Ave.) / 5-11PM, FREE
Happy Hour is 5–7 pm.

“Every month, Brooklyn Museum opens its doors for a free day of talks, performances, art workshops and curator-led tours of exhibitions. At this installment, catch live musical performances from the Skins and Aaron Abernathy, experiment with scratch and resist techniques to make art inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat, watch a screening of the 2017 doc Whose Streets?, get down with the Everyday People dance party, attend community talks and lots more.”

“Everyday People – This party started in 2012 as a brunch gathering for stylish New Yorkers to get down. Since then, the soiree has grown into a veritable dance behemoth and toured the nation, but it’s never lost track of its roots. The series returns one of its favorite locales, the Brooklyn Museum, with banging sets of Afrobeat, hip-hop, reggae and more. It might be the depths of winter, but bring your summer style A-game.” (TONY)

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BONUS:
Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 10 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

======================================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

======================================================
Bonus NYC Events – Music Venues:
So much fine live music every night in this town. These are my favorite non jazz music venues on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who’s playing tonight:

City Winery – 155 Varick St., citywinery.com, 212-608-0555
Feinstein’s/54 Below – 254 W54th St., 54below.com, 646-476-3551
Joe’s Pub @ Public Theater – 425 Lafayette St., joespub.com, 212-967-7555
Metropolitan Room – 34W22ndSt., metropolitan room.com, 212-206-0440
Beacon Theatre – 2124 Broadway @ 74th St., beacontheatre.com, 212-465-6500
Town Hall – 123 W43rd St., thetownhall.org, 212-997-6661
B.B. King’s Blues Bar – 237W42nd St., bbkingblues.com, 212-997-2144
Bowery Ballroom – 6 Delancey St. boweryballroom.com,
Le Poisson Rouge – 158 Bleecker St., lepoissonrouge.com, 212-505-3474

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. caffevivaldi.com, 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening discovery and enjoyment.
See Below.

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♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

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NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):
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A PremierPub and 3 Good Eating Places – Greenwich Village

Caffe Vivaldi / 32 Jones Street (btw. Bleecker St./W4th St.)

Café Vivaldi is a classic, intimate club located in Greenwich Village on Jones Street, the street featured on the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, “Freewheelin’. ”

maxresdefaultEach night Ishrat, the long time proprietor and impresario, carefully curates and schedules an eclectic series of musicians. You can often see him at his table in the corner, hard at work reviewing music videos and listening to cd demos on his laptop, scouting out future bookings. Musicians come from all over to play and sing in a club in Greenwich Village. Some are local New Yorkers, others are just passing through, in town for a few days.

There is a small bar, seating maybe 10. It’s close to the stage and I find it’s a perfect spot to sip a glass of red wine while listening to the music. The room itself has the performance area at one end and a cozy fireplace at the other. The performance area here is small, dominated by a large black Yamaha Grand piano. Tables are bunched together and most people at the tables are eating lite meals or sampling the wonderful desserts.

There is also a good selection of fairly priced wines,  but you are here because of the music. You can never be quite sure what you’re going to find, and that’s half the charm of this place. It’s not a home run every night, but many nights it’s pretty special.

I remember the night I saw the most talented bossa nova group, just in from San Paulo. As I listened, I wondered if there was any better music playing anywhere else in New York City that night. And at Caffé Vivaldi there is never a cover charge. Their recently redesigned web site does give you a better idea of the type of music playing each night.

At one time Greenwich Village was filled with clubs just like this, but times change. Real estate interests have impacted the village, and not for the better. Even Caffé Vivaldi had a rough time recently, when a new landlord raised the rent exorbitantly. Fortunately, Ishrat has built a loyal following over the years, and a fund raiser and slightly more reasonable rent has kept Café Vivaldi in business.

When Woody Allen and Al Pacino wanted to make movies featuring the timeless quality of Greenwich Village they came to Vivaldi. It’s important that we keep this special place alive, for if we lose Cafe Vivaldi, NYCity will have lost a piece of it’s soul.

Website: http://caffevivaldi.com/
Phone #: (212) 691-7538
Hours: Music generally 7:30PM – 11PM, but varies
Lunch/Dinner 11AM-on
Subway: #1 to Christopher St.
Walk 1 blk S. on 7th ave S. to Bleecker St., 1 blk left on Bleecker to Jones St., 50 yards left on Jones St. to Caffe V.
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“Pub” is used in it’s broadest sense – bars, bar/restaurants, jazz clubs, wine bars, tapas bars, craft beer bars, dive bars, cocktail lounges, and of course, pubs – just about anyplace you can get a drink without a cover charge.

If you have a fave premier pub or good eating place on Manhattan’s WestSide let us all know about it – leave a comment.
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3 Good Eating places

It’s not difficult to find a place to eat in Manhattan.
Finding a good, inexpensive place to eat is a bit harder.
Here are a few of my faves in this neighborhood:

Fish – 280 Bleecker St. (just a bit S. of 7th ave South)
This was an easy pick – the best raw bar special in town. $9 gets you 6 of the freshest oysters or clams + a glass of wine or beer. Don’t know how they can do it, but I tell everyone I know about this place. And it’s located right in the heart of some of the best no cover music in town.

Bleecker Street Pizza – 69 7th ave S. (corner of Bleecker St.)
The place is tiny and not much to look at, but this is one good slice. They like to brag that they have been voted “Best pizza in NY” 3 years in a row by the Food Network. I believe them. I would have voted for them.

Num Pang – 21 E 12th St. (btw. University Place/5th ave.)
This is a Cambodian banh mi sandwich shop that kept me well fed while I was in class nearby recently. It’s cramped, even for NYCity, but usually there is room up the spiral staircase to sit down and eat. In good weather carry your sandwich a few blocks to Union Square park. You may have to wait a few minutes, because everything is freshly made, but it’s worth it. Can you believe – an unheard of 26 food rating by Zagat.

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“3 Good Eating places” focuses on a quick bite, what I call “Fine Fast Food – NYCity Style”
No reservations needed.
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NYCity is the most diverse and interesting place to find a meal anywhere in the world. With more than 24,000 eating establishments you might welcome some advice.

◊ For all my picks of 54 Good Eating places, and essays on my favorite 18 PremierPubs in 9 Neighborhoods on Manhattan’s WestSide, order a copy of my e-book:
“Eating and Drinking on NYCity’s WestSide” ($4.99, available Spring 2018).
◊ Order before May 31 28, 2018 and receive a bonus – 27 of my favorite casual dining places with free Wi-Fi.

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NYC Events,”Only the Best” (02/02) + Museum Special Exhibitions: Manhattan’s WestSide

Posted on 02/02/2018 by GregD

Today’s Super 7 NYC Events > FRIDAY/ FEBRUARY 02, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

The New York Pops: Heart and Soul
Carnegie Hall / 8PM, $21+
“The Pops snap and crackle through a program devoted to the history of R&B, with symphonic arrangements of hits by Al Green, Whitney Houtson, John Legend and more. Broadway stars James Monroe Iglehart (Hamilton) and Capathia Jenkins (Caroline, or Change) are the guest vocalists; Steven Reineke wields the baton.” (TONY)

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6 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)
>> Compagnie Hervé Koubi
>> First Fridays: Afro-Latino Edition Celebrating Arturo Schomburg
>> Losers Lounge: Tribute to Barbra Streisand
>> MARY HALVORSON
>> Jamison Ross
>>The Louvre on Fire: History of a False Report
=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

Compagnie Hervé Koubi
Joyce Theater / 8PM, $10+
“What amounts to a festival of French and North African hip-hop continues in Chelsea as Compagnie Hervé Koubi performs the New York premiere of What the Day Owes to the Night. This eighteen-year-old troupe, whose members hail from Algeria and Burkina Faso, mixes highly athletic moves from capoeira, martial arts, hip-hop, and contemporary dance, performing to a score that ranges from Johann Sebastian Bach and Hamza El Din to the Kronos Quartet and traditional Sufi music. Award-winning director Koubi, of Algerian descent, grew up in the south of France, studying biology and dance en route to becoming a pharmacist, but in the 21st century tossed in his heart with dance and attended Rosella Hightower’s school in Cannes.” (Elizabeth Zimmer, VillageVoice)

First Fridays: Afro-Latino Edition Celebrating Arturo Schomburg
Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Blvd./ 6PM,
“Kick off Black History Month during the Schomburg Center’s monthly get-down featuring signature drinks and Latin rhythms from DJ IRS and a hip-shaking performance by Afro-Venezuelan drum group Tambor y Caña. Wear your dancing shoes and get ready to bust some serious moves.” (TONY)

Losers Lounge: Tribute to Barbra Streisand (Feb.01-03)
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater / 7pm, 9:30pm; $30
The celebrated, stalwart NYC covers act turns its collective hand to the oeuvre of the one and only Barbra Streisand. Thanks to her last studio album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, Streisand is the only artist in history to have Billboard chart–topping records in six separate decades, so the Losers will have no shortage of material to work with.” (TONY)

Jamison Ross (Feb.02-04)
The Jazz Standard / 7:30PM, 9:30PM, $30
“The winner of the 2012 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition for the drums, Jamison Ross continues his graceful, gradual transition as a top-flight jazz singer on his excellent second full-length for Concord, All for One. The 29-year-old cites the 1964 Marvin Gaye LP When I’m Alone I Cry as a key influence here, but it’s his current home of New Orleans that ultimately proves to be the creative beacon for this collection of cool covers and poignant originals.

Renditions of Alan Toussaint’s 1966 hit for Lee Dorsey (“A Mellow Time”) and the 1993 Willie Tee single that serves as the title cut emit a sweet, soulful sentiment — something at the intersection of Donny Hathaway and the Neville Brothers. Nods to such early-twentieth-century greats as Kurt Weill (“My Ship”) and Fats Waller (“Let’s Sing Again”) add further credence to Ross’s growth as a singer and bandleader beyond the drumstand. If you’re a fan of the bold paths vocal jazz is taking in 2018, you should make a point to see Ross during his four-night stand at the Standard.” (Ron Hart, Village Voice)

MARY HALVORSON (Jan. 30-Feb. 4).
at the Stone / 8:30PM, $
“Ms. Halvorson — whose crinkly, caustic sound makes her one of the most distinctive guitarists in improvised music — will begin her weeklong residency at the Stone with aa triplicate of duets. She’ll play with the drummer Randy Peterson on Tuesday, the guitarist Liberty Ellman on Wednesday and the guitarist Ben Monder on Thursday. On Feb. 2, she expands to a trio (with John Hébert on bass and Ches Smith on drums); over weekend she plays with a different quartet each night.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

The Louvre on Fire: History of a False Report
Manfred Posani Löwenstein, Université de Montréal
Columbia University, 116th St. & Broadway / 12:15PM, FREE
“Learn about a different kind of “fake news” at this event centered on the time the Louvre supposedly caught on fire in 1871 – possibly the first case of a false report, which made headlines around the world.”

——————————————————————————————————

BONUS:
Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 11 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

=====================================================
Bonus NYC events– Jazz Venues:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 are underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 are within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

==================================================================================
♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

============================================================

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

===============================================================================

WHAT’S ON VIEW
My Fave Special Exhibitions – MUSEUMS / Manhattan’s WestSide
(See the New York Times Arts Section for listings of all museums,
and also to see their expanded reviews of these exhibitions)

Museum of Modern Art:

A special pat on the back to MOMA, who is now displaying art from the seven countries affected by Trump’s travel ban.

“Trump’s ban against refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations has sparked acts of defiance in NYC, from demonstrations across town, to striking taxicab drivers at JFK to Middle Eastern bodega owners closing their shops in protest. Recently, the Museum Of Modern added its two cents by bringing out artworks it owns from the affected countries, and hanging them prominently within the galleries usually reserved for 19th- and 20th-century artworks from Europe and the United States. Paintings by Picasso and Matisse, for example, were removed to make way for pieces by Tala Madani (from Iran), Ibrahim El-Salahi (from Sudan) and architect Zaha Hadid (from Iraq). The rehanging, which was unannounced, aims to create a symbolic welcome that repudiates Trump by creating a visual dialog between the newly added works and the more familiar objects from MoMA’s permanent collection.” (TONY)

Stephen Shore (thru May 28)

“This immersive and staggeringly charming retrospective is devoted to one of the best American photographers of the past half century. Shore has peers—Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, and, especially, William Eggleston—in a generation that, in the nineteen-seventies, stormed to eminence with color film, which art photographers had long disdained. His best-known series, “American Surfaces” and “Uncommon Places,” are both from the seventies and were mostly made in rugged Western states. The pictures in these series share a quality of surprise: appearances surely unappreciated if even really noticed by anyone before—in rural Arizona, a phone booth next to a tall cactus, on which a crude sign (“GARAGE”) is mounted, and, on a small-city street in Wisconsin, a movie marquee’s neon wanly aglow, at twilight. A search for fresh astonishments has kept Shore peripatetic, on productive sojourns in Mexico, Scotland, Italy, Ukraine, and Israel. He has remained a vestigial Romantic, stopping in space and 
time to frame views that exert a peculiar tug on him. This framing is resolutely formalist: subjects composed laterally, from edge to edge, and in depth. There’s never a “background.” The most distant element is as considered as the nearest. But only when looking for it are you conscious of Shore’s formal discipline, because it is as fluent as a language learned from birth. His best pictures at once arouse feelings and leave us alone to make what we will of them. He delivers truths, whether hard or easy, with something very like mercy.” (NewYorker)

Whitney Museum

Laura Owens (thru Feb.04)

© Laura Owens

“In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Owens heralded the comeback of painting with a succession of unbelievably cool, well-timed canvases that breezily dispensed with outdated notions of style, gesture, and the mutual exclusivity of formalism and illusionistic space. And she’s made news ever since: this welcome mid-career retrospective neatly charts the hairpin turns of the Los Angeles artist’s rigorous, funny, and very influential career thus far. A mischievously austere painting, from 1997, shows a blue expanse interrupted by seagulls, nominally and stickily rendered, as if piped on with black icing. The artist undercuts our understanding of “sky,” though, by airbrushing the birds’ shadows onto her monochrome. While it’s not so hard to believe that the tricky collisions of painterly quotation from the next few years are from the same artist, by 2002, when Owens deploys decorative painting in an enchanting woodland scene, we’re in a different world; then we’re in another, with her abstractions of chewed-up grids, digital brushstrokes, and sculptural, stuccolike blobs. The through line, of course, is her passionate loyalty to the medium itself, but, as demonstrated by the exhibition’s finale—an installation of two-sided, freestanding paintings, from 2015—she’s not afraid to move off the wall; it’s anyone’s guess what comes next.” (NewYorker)

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For other selected Museum and Gallery Special Exhibitions see Recent Posts in right Sidebar dated 01/31 and 01/29.
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NYC Events,”Only the Best” (02/01) + Today’s Featured Pub (WestVillage)

Posted on 02/01/2018 by GregD

Today’s Sweet 6 NYC Events > THURSDAY/ FEBRUARY 01, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

JANE BIRKIN
at Carnegie Hall / 8PM, $55+
“Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had one of the great romances of the 20th century, expressed through two decades’ worth of sly, decadent French love songs — from the succès de scandale of “Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus” in 1969 through “Amours des Feintes,” released less than a year before Mr. Gainsbourg’s death in 1991. In recent years, Ms. Birkin has crisscrossed the world performing new orchestral arrangements of her late ex-lover’s music. “It’s a wonderful feeling, but equally sad, because the most beautiful songs were written when I left him,” she told The New York Times in November. At this Carnegie Hall show, she will be backed by the Wordless Music Orchestra, with a special guest appearance from Rufus Wainwright, one of Mr. Gainsbourg’s greatest stylistic heirs. It’s sure to be a night of bittersweet beauty and high wit.” (NYT-SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON)

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5 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)

>> Losers Lounge: Tribute to Barbra Streisand
>> MARY HALVORSON
>> Jamison Ross
>>Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci
>> Anna Meredith

=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

Losers Lounge: Tribute to Barbra Streisand (Feb.01-03)
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater / 7pm, 9:30pm; $30
The celebrated, stalwart NYC covers act turns its collective hand to the oeuvre of the one and only Barbra Streisand. Thanks to her last studio album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, Streisand is the only artist in history to have Billboard chart–topping records in six separate decades, so the Losers will have no shortage of material to work with.” (TONY)

Jamison Ross
The Jazz Standard / 7:30PM, 9:30PM, $30
“The winner of the 2012 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition for the drums, Jamison Ross continues his graceful, gradual transition as a top-flight jazz singer on his excellent second full-length for Concord, All for One. The 29-year-old cites the 1964 Marvin Gaye LP When I’m Alone I Cry as a key influence here, but it’s his current home of New Orleans that ultimately proves to be the creative beacon for this collection of cool covers and poignant originals.

Renditions of Alan Toussaint’s 1966 hit for Lee Dorsey (“A Mellow Time”) and the 1993 Willie Tee single that serves as the title cut emit a sweet, soulful sentiment — something at the intersection of Donny Hathaway and the Neville Brothers. Nods to such early-twentieth-century greats as Kurt Weill (“My Ship”) and Fats Waller (“Let’s Sing Again”) add further credence to Ross’s growth as a singer and bandleader beyond the drumstand. If you’re a fan of the bold paths vocal jazz is taking in 2018, you should make a point to see Ross during his four-night stand at the Standard.” (Ron Hart, Village Voice)

Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci
Metropolitan Opera House / 8PM, $25+
“Roberto Alagna takes on the leading tenor roles in both parts of opera’s most popular double bill. In Cavalleria Rusticana, Ekaterina Semenchuk and Eva-Maria Westbroek share the role of the woebegone Santuzza, with Aleksandra Kurzak as the hot-blooded Nedda in Pagliacci. Nicola Luisotti conducts Sir David McVicar’s production, which heightens the melo-dramaticaction of this timeless verismo pairing.”

Anna Meredith
Le Poisson Rouge / 8PM, $15
“Anna Meredith is a composer and performer whose music manages to exist in the netherworld between classical and modern. While audiences in the former category struggled to understand her, Meredith found a home among other category-defying acts who’ve made their way in the indie world, like Owen Pallett and Sigur Rós. Her slightly hallucinogenic tracks sound like classical that’s been twisted and released with unfamiliar kaleidoscopic patterns. The Guardian calls her innovative songs “majestic bangers”; it’s not hard to imagine one of them sampled on a hit rap song.” (Sophie Weiner, Village Voice)

MARY HALVORSON (Jan. 30-Feb. 4).
at the Stone / 8:30PM, $
“Ms. Halvorson — whose crinkly, caustic sound makes her one of the most distinctive guitarists in improvised music — will begin her weeklong residency at the Stone with aa triplicate of duets. She’ll play with the drummer Randy Peterson on Tuesday, the guitarist Liberty Ellman on Wednesday and the guitarist Ben Monder on Thursday. On Feb. 2, she expands to a trio (with John Hébert on bass and Ches Smith on drums); over weekend she plays with a different quartet each night.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

Please come back for smart stuff events tomorrow.

——————————————————————————————————

BONUS:
Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 12 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

=====================================================
Bonus NYC events– Jazz Clubs:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

==================================================================================
♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2016.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

=========================================================

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

================================================================================

A PremierPub / West Village

Corner Bistro / 331 W. 4th St.

Sometimes you just need a beer and a burger. If so, Corner Bistro is the place you want. Located just outside the hip Meatpacking district, this corner bar and grill is decidedly unhip, but it’s not uncrowded, especially at night. Seems that everyone knows this place has one of the better burgers in town.

kac_120405_phude_corner_bistro_bar_1000-600x450In the maze of streets known as the West Village, where West 4th intersects with West 12th (and West 11th, and West 10th, go figure), you will eventually find Corner Bistro on the corner of West 4th and Jane Street. An unassuming neighborhood tavern, it looks just like dozens of other taverns around town.

The bartender tells me that the Corner Bistro celebrated it’s 50th anniversary last year. The well worn interior tells me that the place itself is much older.

Corner Bistro has outlasted many of those other taverns around town because they know how to keep it simple — just good burgers and beer, fairly priced. The classic bistro Burger is only $6.75, and should be ordered medium rare, which will be plenty rare for most folks. Actually, it will be a juicy, messy delight – make sure you have extra napkins. I like to pull up a stool and sit by the large front window in the afternoon, where I can rest my burger and beer on the shelf, and watch the Villagers walk by.

Corner Bistro seems to attract very different groups of patrons depending on time of day. While it’s crowded with locals in the evening, in the afternoon you hear different foreign languages, and watch groups of euro tourists wander in, led by their guidebooks and smartphones.

For the classic Bistro experience, order your burger with a McSorley’s draft, the dark preferably. This is the same beer that you can get over at the original McSorley’s in the East Village, the pub that claims to be the oldest continually operating bar in NYCity. The only difference is that this McSorley’s ale is served with a smile by the bartenders here. Or you can get a Sierra Nevada, Stella, or Hoegaarden on tap if you want to go upscale a bit. Either way this is a simple, but quality burger and beer experience that is just too rare these days (sorry for the pun).
=========================================================
Website: cornerbistrony.com
Phone #: 212-242-9502
Hours: 11:30am-4am Mon-Sat; 12pm-4am Sun
Happy Hour: NO
Music: Juke Box
Subway: #1/2/3 to 14th St. (S end of platform)
Walk 2 blk W. on 13th St. to 8th Ave.; 1 blk S. on 8th Ave. to Jane St.
Update:
==============================================================
“Pub” is used in it’s broadest sense – bars, bar/restaurants, jazz clubs, wine bars, tapas bars, craft beer bars, dive bars, cocktail lounges, and of course, pubs – just about anyplace you can get a drink without a cover charge (except for certain jazz clubs).

If you have a fave premier pub or good eating place on Manhattan’s WestSide let us all know about it – leave a comment.
===========================================================================
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/31) + GallerySpecialExhibits: Chelsea

Posted on 01/31/2018 by GregD

Today’s Sweet 6 NYC Events > WEDNESDAY/ JANUARY 31, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

KEVIN SUN NEW TRIO
at Jazz Gallery / 7:30 and 9:30 p.m., $15
“This may be the first you’ve heard of Mr. Sun, a tenor saxophonist, but that will soon change. He knows a lot about the past 20 years of contemporary jazz saxophone: the shoulder-hugging maneuvers of Mark Turner, the snaky melodicism of Chris Potter, the susurrating quiet of Chris Speed. But Mr. Sun reaches back farther. Sometimes you’ll hear a smoldering kernel of Albert Ayler; when he picks up the clarinet, the tonal gamesmanship of Jimmy Giuffre looms in. Boil it all together, and Mr. Sun’s playing develops an identity of its own, equal parts direct and discursive. That’s clear on his debut album, “Trio,” which features the rhythm section on hand at the Jazz Gallery: the bassist Walter Stinson and the drummer Matt Honor.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

==========================================================

5 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)

>> Inside Chamber Music
>> MARY HALVORSON
>> ROBERTA GAMBARINI
>> A Celebration of James Joyce with Robert J. Seidman
>> Tibetan Astrology + Divination

=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

Inside Chamber Music
Daniel & Joanna S. Rose Studio, Lincoln Center / 6:30PM, $25
“Join distinguished composer and radio personality Bruce Adolphe for investigations and insights into masterworks performed during the Alice Tully Hall season. Inside Chamber Music lectures are beloved by regulars and a revelation to first-timers for their depth, accessibility, and brilliance. Each lecture is supported by excerpts from the featured piece, performed live by CMS artists.”
Tonight: Beethoven Quartet in C major for Strings, Op. 59, No. 3, “Razumovsky” (1806)

MARY HALVORSON (Jan. 30-Feb. 4).
at the Stone / 8:30PM, $
“Ms. Halvorson — whose crinkly, caustic sound makes her one of the most distinctive guitarists in improvised music — will begin her weeklong residency at the Stone with aa triplicate of duets. She’ll play with the drummer Randy Peterson on Tuesday, the guitarist Liberty Ellman on Wednesday and the guitarist Ben Monder on Thursday. On Feb. 2, she expands to a trio (with John Hébert on bass and Ches Smith on drums); over weekend she plays with a different quartet each night.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

ROBERTA GAMBARINI (Jan. 29-31)
at Blue Note / 8 and 10:30PM, $20-$35
“Ms. Gambarini, a vocalist, is all assiduous precision and formidable strength. She brings it to bear on jazz standards and classic Brazilian fare, always with the help of top-tier accompanists. For this run her band includes Jeb Patton on piano, John Lee on bass and Victor Lewis on drums.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

A Celebration of James Joyce with Robert J. Seidman
McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St./ 6PM, FREE
“February 2nd is the 136th anniversary of James Joyce’s birth, and his intoxicating influence shows no sign of waning. Join scholar, novelist, and screenwriter Robert J. Seidman in a celebration of Joyce’s ageless allure. With Don Gifford, Seidman is co-editor of the definitive annotation of Ulysses, and his conversancy in Joyce’s biography and tireless attention to the text make for a lively exposition. Whether you’re new to Joyce or a seasoned reader, join us for a roving conversation.”

Tibetan Astrology + Divination
Rubin Museum of Art, 150 W. 17th St./ 7PM, $20
“Max out the potential auspiciousness of the year ahead with a session on Tibetan astrology led by Dr. Tenzin Dakpa, a senior doctor of Tibetan medicine, and Tashi Chodron, the Rubin Museum of Art’s Assistant Manager of Himalayan Cultural Programs & Partnerships. The workshop will reveal the practice’s rich heritage and its practical applications for well-being.” (ThoughtGallery.org)

——————————————————————————————————

BONUS:
Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

PLUS
National Hot Chocolate Day
Step away from the Swiss Miss mix.
Hot chocolate in NYC to try, from Dominique Ansel Bakery, Van Leeuwen, more
Don’t be basic and order the plain stuff to celebrate on Jan. 31. Especially not when we’ve rounded up some of the more unique varieties — from cups bedecked with “blossoming” marshmallows to vegan alternatives with coconut sugar — city bakeries and ice cream shops are selling.

With temperatures regularly dipping below freezing in recent weeks, we know you’ll be seeking these before and beyond the one-day holiday

Hot chocolate in NYC to try, from Dominique Ansel Bakery, Van Leeuwen, more

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 13 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

=====================================================
Bonus NYC events– Jazz Venues:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 are underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 are within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

==================================================================================
♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

===========================================================

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

================================================================================

Chelsea Art Gallery District*

Chelsea is the heart of the NYCity contemporary art scene. Home to more than 300 art galleries, the Rubin Museum, the Joyce Theater and The Kitchen performance spaces, there is no place like it anywhere in the world. Come here to browse free exhibitions by world-renowned artists and those unknowns waiting to be discovered in an art district that is concentrated between West 18th and West 27th Streets, and 10th and 11th Avenues. Afterwards stop in the Chelsea Market, stroll on the High Line, or rest up at one of the many cafes and bars and discuss the fine art.

Gordon Parks: I Am You, Part 1
New views from a late visionary.
The first installment of two, this show devoted to the great photographer of the civil-rights movement focuses on lesser-known work from the ’50s and ’60s, like portraits of artists including Calder and Giacometti and vérité fashion photography that paved the way for today’s street-style portraiture.
Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street. Opens January 11.(NYMagazine)

Here is an exhibition the New Yorker likes:

“The Shadow Archive: An Investigation Into Vernacular Portrait Photography”

Walther Collection, 526 W. 26th St. (thru Mar.31)

“The first in a multiyear series of shows about photographs made for commercial or practical purposes, curated by Brian Wallis, considers the portrait. Most of the images date to the nineteenth century; all of them fit into typologies. Fifteen tintypes of “workers with tools of their trade” include a barber, a piano tuner, and a sword swallower; several mug shots attributed to the California sheriff Thomas Cunningham are so picturesque that they could be mistaken for stills from a Hollywood period piece. Passport photographers across Africa take full-length portraits and cut out the heads, leaving behind accidental studies of fashion. A mesmerizing series of such discards, shown here, were taken against a red background in Gulu, Uganda, and collected by the Italian-born journalist Martina Bacigalupo. A found group of forty-eight color snapshots of migrant farmworkers, each holding up a paper number—their source is unknown—takes the idea of identifying documents in a more chilling direction.”

==========================================================

For a listing of 25 essential galleries in the Chelsea Art Gallery District, organized by street, which enables you to create your own Chelsea Art Gallery crawl, see the Chelsea Gallery Guide (nycgo.com) Or check out TONY magazine’s list of the “Best Chelsea Galleries” and click through to see what’s on view.

*Now plan your own gallery crawl, but better to plan your visits for Tuesday through Saturday; most galleries are closed Sunday and Monday.

TIP: After your gallery tour, stop in Ovest at 513W27th St. for Aperitivo Italiano (Happy Hour on steroids). Discuss all the great art you have viewed over a drink and a very tasty selection of FREE appetizers (M-F, 5-8pm). OR try the NYT recommendation: “When you’re done, adjourn to the newly renovated Bottino , the Chelsea art world’s unofficial canteen on 10th Avenue (btw 24/25 St.) “

=======================================================
For other selected Museum and Gallery Special Exhibitions see recent posts in right sidebar dated 01/29 and 01/27.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/30) + Today’s Featured Pub (Midtown West)

Posted on 01/30/2018 by GregD

Today’s Super 7 NYC Events > TUESDAY/ JANUARY 30, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

JOHN HOLLENBECK LARGE ENSEMBLE
at Le Poisson Rouge / 8 p.m, $20
“The big-band LSD meditation you’ve been waiting for can be found in “Long Swing Dream” from the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble’s grand new All Can Work. The drummer-composer’s third album with his powerful twenty-piece ensemble is richly inventive, as usual, and contains longer and shorter pieces inspired by the likes of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, and the group’s late trumpeter, Laurie Frink. There’s also a high-register remake of Billy Strayhorn’s “Elf,” and a maximalist rendition of Kraftwerk’s “The Model,” which hearkens back to Hollenbeck’s earlier collection of pop covers. Tuesday’s concert, the first in a series of co-presentations with the neophilic New Amsterdam label, opens with a set by harmonically kaleidoscopic guitarist Ben Monder and vocal experimentalist Theo Bleckmann, who’ve been recording together since 1997.” (Richard Gehr, Village Voice)

==========================================================

6 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)

>> New York City Ballet
>> Orfeh and Andy Karl: Legally Bound
>>Il Trovatore
>> ROBERTA GAMBARINI
>> Uptown Showdown: Love vs. Money
>> Shaping Policy in the Era of Alternative Facts, Fake News, and Digital Disruption

=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

New York City Ballet
NYS (dhk) Theater, Lincoln Center / 7:30PM, $30+
Today: All Balanchine No. 2
Divertimento No. 15 (Mozart)
The Four Temperaments (Hindemith)
Chaconne (von Gluck)
“Out of Balanchine’s deep archive, these three pure dance treasures emerge to illustrate his ability to create whole worlds without using scenery or story. From regal courts to hushed expanses, sparkling classicism to commanding modernity, these works conjure narratives and settings in the imagination through their costuming, music, and movement.”

Orfeh and Andy Karl: Legally Bound
Feinstein’s/54 Below / 7PM, $70
“One of musical theater’s royal couples—power belter and blue-eyed-soul recording artist Orfeh (soon to be seen in Pretty Woman) and her charming husband, Rocky dreamboat Andy Karl (most recently of Groundhog Day)—share some of their love.” (TONY)

Il Trovatore (Jan 22-Feb 15; next performance Feb.3, 1PM)
The Metropolitan Opera House / 7:30PM, $
“Sir David McVicar’s production of Verdi’s thrilling depiction of life on the edgeexhilarating production features Jennifer Rowley as the noble heroine, Leonora, Yonghoon Lee as the troubadour who loves her, Quinn Kelsey as his rival, and Anita Rachvelishvili as the Gypsy Azucena, whose bloodthirsty curse propels the story.”

ROBERTA GAMBARINI (Jan. 29-31)
at Blue Note / 8 and 10:30PM, $20-$35
“Ms. Gambarini, a vocalist, is all assiduous precision and formidable strength. She brings it to bear on jazz standards and classic Brazilian fare, always with the help of top-tier accompanists. For this run her band includes Jeb Patton on piano, John Lee on bass and Victor Lewis on drums.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

Uptown Showdown: Love vs. Money
Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway / 7:30PM, $16
“Money can’t buy you love. It can buy you: Nice apartments, dinners at Nobu, and the company of gabby arm candy named Gabby or Arm or Candy. If love has any way to defend itself, the comedians at Uptown Showdown will figure it out during this night of unhinged, unpredictable debate.

You never know what to expect at this bi-monthly, wacky debate series that brings together two teams of comedians, writers and performers to argue a chosen topic.

Debaters will argue these lingering questions, drawing from historical fact and personal-opinion in equal measure, and with plenty of silliness and audience participation. Forget about school reform and health care, these issues, heatedly argued by some of the funniest, smartest, intensely wacky creative thinkers around, are the topics that keep us awake at night….in a good way. Winner decided by the audience. Hosted by Matthew Love.”

Shaping Policy in the Era of Alternative Facts, Fake News, and Digital Disruption
Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Ave./ 6:30PM, $40
“A panel looks at the role of think tanks in information-rich societies that tend to ignore factual evidence within the context of rising nationalism, populism, and protectionism.” (ThoughtGallery.org)

——————————————————————————————————

BONUS:
Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 14 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

==========================================================
Bonus NYC Events – Jazz Venues:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 are underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 are within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

==============================================================================
♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and is TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

=======================================================

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

=============================================================================

A PremierPub / Midtown West

Russian Vodka Room / 265 W 52nd St (btw 7th/8th ave)

Sure, you could travel to Minsk or even Brighton Beach, for an authentic Russian experience, but why bother. On those days when you feel you must wash down your dish of kasha with a few glasses of icy, cold vodka, the Russian Vodka Room will definitely satisfy your urge.

From the outside this place looks a bit drab, and with no windows, a bit mysterious. Midtown tourists walk right by on their way to see “Jersey Boys,” just down the block.
(Alas, no more. After 10 years, “Jersey Boys” closed Jan.15)

lThose in the know enter a secret hideaway, a dimly lit front room with soft jazz playing – a perfect spot for an illicit late-night rendezvous, or maybe a meet-up with your Russian spy handler, but that’s later in the evening. Early in the evening the large U-shaped bar fills with the after work happy hour crowd, a group made very happy by the much reduced prices.

Their website says: “Welcome Comrades”. Of course, this welcome focuses on dozens of different vodkas, including their own special infusions, which marinate in giant, clear glass jugs visible around the room. The large vodka martinis ensure that you won’t confuse this place with your mother’s Russian Tea Room.

But man does not live by vodka alone. Eat some food, especially the tapa like appetizers. Be decadent and try the cheese blintzes with chocolate, or try a main dish like beef stroganoff with kasha.

Your best bet is to go on a night when the piano man is playing. This guy, who looks like he has eaten a lot of those cheese blintzes, plays five nights a week from 7 to 12 (no Mondays and Thursdays). When the piano man is playing American pop tunes, and you are at the crowded, dimly lit bar testing the horseradish infused vodka, that’s when the RVR shines.

It’s the kind of place where the noise gets louder and the crowd gets happier as the happy hour goes on. I’m generally a beer guy, but I like to come here with a group of friends. We find a table in the back room near the piano man; we eat, and we drink vodka ‘till it hurts (and it will hurt).
=====================================================
Website: http://www.russianvodkaroom.com/
Phone #: 212-307-5835
Hours: 4pm-2am; Fri-Sun closes 4am (that could be trouble)
Happy Hour: 4-7pm every day
$4 shots infused vodka (2oz), $5 cosmos; $4 czech draft beer
Music: FR-SU; TU-WE / 7pm-12am
Subway: #1 to 50th St.
Walk 2 blk N. on B’way to 52nd St.; 1 blk W. to RVR
Confusingly, the Russian Samovar is right across the street, on the S. side of 52nd St.
The RVR, your destination, is on the N. side of 52nd St.
Update: music now includes a younger, trimmer piano man. “Tiny” we miss you.
Update#2: Rumor that “Tiny” is back playing only on Friday nights – need to check it out.

==============================================================================
“Pub” is used in it’s broadest sense – bars, bar/restaurants, jazz clubs, wine bars, tapas bars, craft beer bars, dive bars, cocktail lounges, and of course, pubs – just about anyplace you can get a drink without a cover charge (except for certain jazz clubs).
If you have a fave premier pub or good eating place on Manhattan’s WestSide let us all know about it – leave a comment.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/29) + Museum Special Exhibitions: Manhattan’s 5th Avenue

Posted on 01/29/2018 by GregD

Today’s Super 7 NYC Events > MONDAY/ JANUARY 29, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

Monday Nights with WBGO: Amina Figarova Sextet
Dizzy’s Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center/ 7:30, 9:30PM, $30
“With pianist Amina Figarova, trumpeter Alex Pope Norris, tenor saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, flutist Bart Platteau, bassist Luques Curtis, and drummer Jason Brown
“Among the most important composers to come into jazz in the new millennium” – JazzTimes

“Hailing from Azerbaijan, the New York-based Amina Figarova is an internationally influenced—and recognized—composer, pianist, and bandleader. Those three roles come to the forefront in Figarova’s sextets, bands with a remarkable chemistry that brings her detailed arrangements to life. Every member of the group stands out as a first-rate individual, but their dedication to Figarova’s eclectic and powerful compositions gives this group its depth of feeling and elite status. The Amina Figarova Sextet has been a hit at major festivals like the Newport Jazz Festival and New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and it’s always a treat to have Figarova back in the intimate Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.”

==========================================================

6 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)

>> Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci
>> ROBERTA GAMBARINI
>>Kevin Smith Kirkwood: Classic Whitney—Alive!
>> We Are Thomasse
>> Going Blind: A Documentary Screening & Discussion
>> Tony Shalhoub | The Band’s Visit: Screening and Conversation

=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

Cavalleria Rusticana & Pagliacci (next performance Feb.01, 8PM)
Metropolitan Opera House / 7:30PM, $25+
“Roberto Alagna takes on the leading tenor roles in both parts of opera’s most popular double bill. In Cavalleria Rusticana, Ekaterina Semenchuk and Eva-Maria Westbroek share the role of the woebegone Santuzza, with Aleksandra Kurzak as the hot-blooded Nedda in Pagliacci. Nicola Luisotti conducts Sir David McVicar’s production, which heightens the melo-dramaticaction of this timeless verismo pairing.”

ROBERTA GAMBARINI (Jan. 29-31)
at Blue Note / 8 and 10:30PM, $20-$35
“Ms. Gambarini, a vocalist, is all assiduous precision and formidable strength. She brings it to bear on jazz standards and classic Brazilian fare, always with the help of top-tier accompanists. For this run her band includes Jeb Patton on piano, John Lee on bass and Victor Lewis on drums.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Kevin Smith Kirkwood: Classic Whitney—Alive!
Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater / 9:30pm; $25
“On a night off from his ensemble role in Broadway’s Kinky Boots, Kirkwood takes center stage as Whitney Houston in a show that impressively re-creates the doomed diva’s greatest hits and concert banter.” (TONY)

We Are Thomasse
Peoples Improv Theater / 9:30pm; $8
“We Are Thomasse, the British-American duo that’s been compared to both Monty Python and Key & Peele, serves up sharp wit and lightning-quick sketch comedy—over two dozen sketches in 45 minutes!—at its cheeky show.” (TONY)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

Going Blind: A Documentary Screening & Discussion
The New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Ave./ 6PM, FREE
In recognition of Glaucoma Awareness Month, and the ongoing critical need to address issues and needs of millions of Americans dealing with vision loss, the Academy is pleased to host a screening of the documentary Going Blind: Coming out of the Dark About Vision Loss.

Produced and directed by Peabody Award winner Joseph Lovett, the documentary looks at all aspects of vision loss: detecting, treating, and coping.

This documentary provides important learnings on early detection and treatment options as well as thoughtful insights on coping with vision loss for both medical professionals and general audiences.

Following the screening, the director and a panel of experts will discuss the film and answer questions from the audience.”

Tony Shalhoub | The Band’s Visit: Screening and Conversation
Temple Emanu-El, 1 E. 65th St./ 7PM, FREE
“The misadventures of an Egyptian “Ceremonial Police Orchestra” stranded in a remote Israeli town are hardly the ordinary fare of a Broadway musical. Nonetheless, The Band’s Visit has captivated both audiences and critics, straight from a sold-out run at the Atlantic Theater Company last season. “It is time to fall in love with one of the most ravishing musicals ever,” wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Rex Reed called it “a work of perfection.”

But that fictional Egyptian band didn’t start off on stage. It sprang to life in a 2007 Israeli film of the same name, one of the best movies of the year according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Streicker Center is delighted to present the film and a fascinating discussion with key players in its screen-to-stage journey.”

——————————————————————————————————

BONUS:

Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 15 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

===========================================================
Bonus NYC events– Jazz Clubs:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 are underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 are within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

==================================================================================
♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

========================================================

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

================================================================================

WHAT’S ON VIEW
These are My Fave Special Exhibitions @ MUSEUMS / Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue
(See the New York Times Arts Section for listings of all museum exhibitions,
and also see the expanded reviews of these exhibitions)

Frick Collection

‘MURILLO: THE SELF-PORTRAITS’ (through Feb. 4, 2018). “Two flawlessly executed selfies by one of the leading painters of the Spanish Golden Age are united for the first time in centuries in this revealing, somewhat melancholy exhibition on mastery and aging. Around 1650, the thirtysomething Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted himself as an ambitious young painter with pursed lips and arched eyebrows, staring out incongruously from a block of ancient marble. The young painter was already imagining himself as a man for the ages, but success seems to have worn down Murillo in the later self-portrait, from about 1670. His hair has grown thinner, he’s developed a double chin, and he extends his hand as if desperate to connect to us.” (Farago)

 Neue Galerie

‘WIENER WERKSTÄTTE, 1903-1932: THE LUXURY OF BEAUTY,’ (LAST DAY) “Fruit bowls, umbrella stands, swanky wallpapers, lavish curtains: The only thing the Wiener Werkstätte couldn’t make is a profit. This substantial exhibition on the most important design firm in early-20th-century Vienna brings together more than 400 works of Modernist applied arts, designed in a new kind of studio that united artists and artisans in a single enterprise. Their rational, rectilinear creations, made of silver or pricey oak, won a following among imperial Vienna’s bourgeoisie, but perpetual cost overruns and the coming of war pushed the Wiener Werkstätte into decline. The 1920s were the last gasp for the firm, under the blingier designer Dagobert Peche, whose mirrors and cruets were as florid as his predecessors’ were straitlaced.” (Farago)
212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org

Museum of the City of New York

NY AT ITS CORE (ongoing)
“Ten years in the making, New York at Its Core tells the compelling story of New York’s rise from a striving Dutch village to today’s “Capital of the World.” The exhibition captures the human energy that drove New York to become a city like no other and a subject of fascination the world over. Entertaining, inspiring, important, and at times bemusing, New York City “big personalities,” including Alexander Hamilton, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Emma Goldman, JP Morgan, Fiorello La Guardia, Jane Jacobs, Jay-Z, and dozens more, parade through the exhibition. Visitors will also learn the stories of lesser-known New York personalities, like Lenape chieftain Penhawitz and Italian immigrant Susie Rocco. Even animals like the horse, the pig, the beaver, and the oyster, which played pivotal roles in the economy and daily life of New York, get their moment in the historical spotlight. Occupying the entire first floor in three interactive galleries (Port City, 1609-1898, World City, 1898-2012, and Future City Lab) New York at Its Core is shaped by four themes: money, density, diversity, and creativity. Together, they provide a lens for examining the character of the city, and underlie the modern global metropolis we know today. mcny.org” (NYCity Guide)

and you should be sure to check out these special exhibitions at that little museum on Fifth Ave., The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(open 7 days /week, AND always Pay What You Wish)

‘JAPANESE BAMBOO ART: THE ABBEY COLLECTION’  (through Feb. 4, 2018). “This fabulous show celebrates Diane and Arthur Abbey’s gift of some 70 bamboo baskets and sculptures, which nearly doubles the Met’s already outstanding holdings in this genre and brings them into the 20th and 21st centuries. The curator has embedded this trove within what is essentially a second exhibition that traces bamboo’s presence through folding screens, ink paintings, porcelain, netsuke, kimonos and more.” (NYT-Roberta Smith) 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

DAVID HOCKNEY (through Feb.25, 2018) “For nearly 60 years, David Hockney (British, born 1937) has pursued a singular career with a love for painting and its intrinsic challenges. This major retrospective—the exhibition’s only North American venue—honors the artist in his 80th year by presenting his most iconic works and key moments of his career from 1960 to the present.

Working in a wide range of media with equal measures of wit and intelligence, Hockney has examined, probed, and questioned how to capture the perceived world of movement, space, and time in two dimensions. The exhibition offers a grand overview of the artist’s achievements across all media, including painting, drawing, photography, and video. From his early experiments with modernist abstraction and mid-career experiments with illusion and realism, to his most recent, jewel-toned landscapes, Hockney has consistently explored the nature of perception and representation with both intellectual rigor and sheer delight in the act of looking.” (Metropolitan Museum)

“Give it up for David Hockney, one of painting’s elder statesmen, and for his crystalline retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which proceeds in a string of perfectly curated mini-exhibitions. Check at the door the usual caveats and tsk-tsks regarding this wildly popular Anglo-Californian — that he’s a lightweight; that his “moment” was the ’60s; that he’s obvious. Suspend at least briefly the belief that a tragic vision, or abstraction, is essential for entry into art history’s pantheon.

No, Mr. Hockney, at 80, is not Jasper Johns or Gerhard Richter. But he has his own greatness, which flows from openly following his own desires — including his attraction to other men — while rigorously exploring the ways art and life feed each other, visually and emotionally. Full disclosure, forthright joy and forward motion are the dynamos of his art, which in my book at least, gives him an edge over Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.” (NYT)

===========================================================
Museum Mile is a section of Fifth Avenue which contains one of the densest displays of culture in the world. Eight museums can be found along this section of Fifth Avenue:
• 105th Street – El Museo del Barrio (closed Sun-Mon)*
• 103rd Street – Museum of the City of New York (open 7 days /week)
•  92nd Street – The Jewish Museum (closed Wed) (Sat FREE) (Thu 5-8 PWYW)
•  91st Street  –  Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (open 7 days /week)
•  89th Street –  National Academy Museum (closed Mon-Tue)
•  88th Street –  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (closed Thu) (Sat 6-8 PWYW)
•  86th Street –  Neue Galerie New York (closed Tue-Wed) (Fri 6-8 FREE)
Last, but certainly not least, America’s premier museum
•  82nd Street – The Metropolitan Museum of Art (open 7 days /week)*
*always Pay What You Wish (PWYW)

Although technically not part of the Museum Mile, the Frick Collection (closed Mon) (Wed 2-6pm PWYW; First Friday each month (exc Jan+Sep) 6-9pm FREE) on the corner of 70th St. and Fifth Avenue and the The Morgan Library & Museum (closed Mon) (Fri 7-9 FREE) on Madison Ave and 37th St are also located near Fifth Ave.
Now plan your own museum crawl (info on hours & admission updated June 2, 2015).
==============================================================
For other selected Museum and Gallery Special Exhibitions see Recent Posts in right Sidebar dated 01/27 and 01/25.
=============================================================

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/28) + Today’s Featured Pub (Greenwich Village)

Posted on 01/28/2018 by GregD

Today’s Super 7 NYC Events > SUNDAY/ JANUARY 28, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

New York City Ballet
NYS (dhk) Theater, Lincoln Center / 3PM, $30+
Today: All Balanchine No. 1
Apollo (Stravinsky)
Mozartiana (Tschaikovsky)
Cortège Hongrois (Glazounov)
“Drawing from a canon of over 400 works, this remarkable assemblage spans the breadth of Balanchine’s career. One of his earliest international successes, Apollo presents the young god as he is ushered into adulthood by the muses of poetry, mime, and dance, and Mozartiana, one of his last masterpieces, begins quietly before building to pure exhilaration. A magnificent pageant, Cortège Hongrois blossoms from a folk-stylized processional to a classical grand pas de deux.”

==========================================================

6 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)

>> WAYNE ESCOFFERY QUARTET
>> Anthony Rapp: Unplugged
>>Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage
>> BroadwayCon
>> The New York Times Travel Show
>> Colleen Eren–Bernie Madoff and The Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism

=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

Anthony Rapp: Unplugged
Feinstein’s/54 Below / 11:30PM, $50
“One of Broadway’s most celebrated rock and rollers, Anthony Rapp (Broadway’s If/Then; Six Degrees of Separation; Rent; You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) brings his Unplugged evening of stories and songs to Feinstein’s/54 Below with musical director Dan Weiss. Unplugged audiences can expect to hear some of the great songs that have inspired Anthony. And what evening with Anthony Rapp would be complete without hearing some iconic songs from Rent and Hedwig & The Angry Inch?”

“Original Rent boy Rapp shares some of his favorite songs, as well as a few numbers from his many forays onto the musical-theater stage.” (TONY)

WAYNE ESCOFFERY QUARTET (Jan. 26-28)
at Smoke / 7, 9 and 10:30PM, $38
“Mr. Escoffery, a tenor saxophonist of fluid and beaming power, is celebrating the release of “Vortex,” an album recorded with his longstanding quartet. That group — an impressive mainline jazz ensemble, with Dave Kikoski on piano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Ralph Peterson on drums — appears here, playing the Escoffery originals featured on the recording.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage (Jan 25-28)
Dizzy’s Club / 7:30PM, +9:30PM, $
“With tenor saxophonist/bass clarinetist/flutist Craig Handy, trombonist Jay Ashby, pianist/accordionist Julian Shore, vocalist Fabiana Masili, percussionist Fernando Saci, and bassist/cavaquinho player/percussionist Nilson Matta

Nilson Matta is well known as the world-class bassist of Trio da Paz, but his solo career as a composer and bandleader is equally noteworthy. His albums are thoughtful aural masterpieces featuring lush harmonies and contemporary Brazilian rhythms. “Brazilian Voyage” is an apt title for tonight’s performance, as Matta’s expert knowledge of Brazilian jazz unfolds as a varied journey through the music’s traditions and contemporary explorations, demonstrating an evolution in which he continues to play a major role.”

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

BroadwayCon
Javits Center / 10AM, $90
“Become a theater expert at BroadwayCon in NYC this weekend.
It’s the last day of BroadwayCon in New York! Head over to the Javits Center to meet your favorite theater stars, buy souvenirs and attend workshops. It will have panels, performances and meet-and-greets with the biggest Broadway stars. Sunday includes a class where you can make a 3-D model of a theater set, and it concludes with a look at upcoming Broadway shows in 2018 that should be on your radar.” (TONY)

The New York Times Travel Show
Javits Center / 10am, $20
“Celebrating 15 years, the New York Times Travel Show is back with more than 550 exhibitors sharing tips of the trade. There will be live seminars featuring Zac Posen, Andrew Zimmern, Samantha Brown, Pauline Frommer and others; cultural performances; culinary demonstrations and tastings; travel advice; travel deals and more. Receive a special discount of $5 off your ticket purchase with code SOCIAL.”

Sunday Meeting | Colleen Eren–Bernie Madoff and The Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism
New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W. 64th St./ 11AM, FREE
“Utilizing critical sociology, criminal justice professor Colleen Eren speaks about her new book, Bernie Madoff and The Crisis: The Public Trial of Capitalism, which looks at the response to the financial crime of the century and our broader tendencies to blame individuals instead of systems./“ (ThoughtGallery.org)

——————————————————————————————————

PLUS It’s the last day for the Winter Antiques Show, which ran from the 19th to the 28th. Head to the Park Avenue Armory to find one-of-a-kind finds from 70 exhibitors.” (UntappedCities)

BONUS:

Broadway Week began last week! Get two-for-one tickets to your favorite shows, from Chicago to Wicked.  NYC Restaurant Week began this week on Monday.

Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 16 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

======================================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

======================================================
Bonus NYC Events – Music Venues:
So much fine live music every night in this town. These are my favorite non jazz music venues on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who’s playing tonight:

City Winery – 155 Varick St., citywinery.com, 212-608-0555
Feinstein’s/54 Below – 254 W54th St., 54below.com, 646-476-3551
Joe’s Pub @ Public Theater – 425 Lafayette St., joespub.com, 212-967-7555
Metropolitan Room – 34W22ndSt., metropolitan room.com, 212-206-0440
Beacon Theatre – 2124 Broadway @ 74th St., beacontheatre.com, 212-465-6500
Town Hall – 123 W43rd St., thetownhall.org, 212-997-6661
B.B. King’s Blues Bar – 237W42nd St., bbkingblues.com, 212-997-2144
Bowery Ballroom – 6 Delancey St. boweryballroom.com,
Le Poisson Rouge – 158 Bleecker St., lepoissonrouge.com, 212-505-3474

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. caffevivaldi.com, 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening discovery and enjoyment.
See Below.

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♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

———————————————————————————————————-

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):
=================================================================================

A PremierPub and 3 Good Eating Places – Greenwich Village

Caffe Vivaldi / 32 Jones Street (btw. Bleecker St./W4th St.)

Café Vivaldi is a classic, intimate club located in Greenwich Village on Jones Street, the street featured on the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, “Freewheelin’. ”

maxresdefaultEach night Ishrat, the long time proprietor and impresario, carefully curates and schedules an eclectic series of musicians. You can often see him at his table in the corner, hard at work reviewing music videos and listening to cd demos on his laptop, scouting out future bookings. Musicians come from all over to play and sing in a club in Greenwich Village. Some are local New Yorkers, others are just passing through, in town for a few days.

There is a small bar, seating maybe 10. It’s close to the stage and I find it’s a perfect spot to sip a glass of red wine while listening to the music. The room itself has the performance area at one end and a cozy fireplace at the other. The performance area here is small, dominated by a large black Yamaha Grand piano. Tables are bunched together and most people at the tables are eating lite meals or sampling the wonderful desserts.

There is also a good selection of fairly priced wines,  but you are here because of the music. You can never be quite sure what you’re going to find, and that’s half the charm of this place. It’s not a home run every night, but many nights it’s pretty special.

I remember the night I saw the most talented bossa nova group, just in from San Paulo. As I listened, I wondered if there was any better music playing anywhere else in New York City that night. And at Caffé Vivaldi there is never a cover charge. Their recently redesigned web site does give you a better idea of the type of music playing each night.

At one time Greenwich Village was filled with clubs just like this, but times change. Real estate interests have impacted the village, and not for the better. Even Caffé Vivaldi had a rough time recently, when a new landlord raised the rent exorbitantly. Fortunately, Ishrat has built a loyal following over the years, and a fund raiser and slightly more reasonable rent has kept Café Vivaldi in business.

When Woody Allen and Al Pacino wanted to make movies featuring the timeless quality of Greenwich Village they came to Vivaldi. It’s important that we keep this special place alive, for if we lose Cafe Vivaldi, NYCity will have lost a piece of it’s soul.

Website: http://caffevivaldi.com/
Phone #: (212) 691-7538
Hours: Music generally 7:30PM – 11PM, but varies
Lunch/Dinner 11AM-on
Subway: #1 to Christopher St.
Walk 1 blk S. on 7th ave S. to Bleecker St., 1 blk left on Bleecker to Jones St., 50 yards left on Jones St. to Caffe V.
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“Pub” is used in it’s broadest sense – bars, bar/restaurants, jazz clubs, wine bars, tapas bars, craft beer bars, dive bars, cocktail lounges, and of course, pubs – just about anyplace you can get a drink without a cover charge.

If you have a fave premier pub or good eating place on Manhattan’s WestSide let us all know about it – leave a comment.
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3 Good Eating places

It’s not difficult to find a place to eat in Manhattan.
Finding a good, inexpensive place to eat is a bit harder.
Here are a few of my faves in this neighborhood:

Fish – 280 Bleecker St. (just a bit S. of 7th ave South)
This was an easy pick – the best raw bar special in town. $9 gets you 6 of the freshest oysters or clams + a glass of wine or beer. Don’t know how they can do it, but I tell everyone I know about this place. And it’s located right in the heart of some of the best no cover music in town.

Bleecker Street Pizza – 69 7th ave S. (corner of Bleecker St.)
The place is tiny and not much to look at, but this is one good slice. They like to brag that they have been voted “Best pizza in NY” 3 years in a row by the Food Network. I believe them. I would have voted for them.

Num Pang – 21 E 12th St. (btw. University Place/5th ave.)
This is a Cambodian banh mi sandwich shop that kept me well fed while I was in class nearby recently. It’s cramped, even for NYCity, but usually there is room up the spiral staircase to sit down and eat. In good weather carry your sandwich a few blocks to Union Square park. You may have to wait a few minutes, because everything is freshly made, but it’s worth it. Can you believe – an unheard of 26 food rating by Zagat.

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“3 Good Eating places” focuses on a quick bite, what I call “Fine Fast Food – NYCity Style”
No reservations needed.
========================================================
NYCity is the most diverse and interesting place to find a meal anywhere in the world. With more than 24,000 eating establishments you might welcome some advice.

◊ For all my picks of 54 Good Eating places, and essays on my favorite 18 PremierPubs in 9 Neighborhoods on Manhattan’s WestSide, order a copy of my e-book:
“Eating and Drinking on NYCity’s WestSide” ($4.99, available Spring 2018).
◊ Order before May 31 28, 2018 and receive a bonus – 27 of my favorite casual dining places with free Wi-Fi.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/27) + Museum Special Exhibitions: Manhattan’s WestSide

Posted on 01/27/2018 by GregD

Today’s Nifty 9 NYC Events > SATURDAY/ JANUARY 27, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Pick one of these:

‘ON THE CORNER OF BOURBON, MALECÓN & BROADWAY’
at Symphony Space / 8PM, $35+
“Three esteemed artists come together here for a night of cross-pollination and exchange uniting the musical traditions of New York, New Orleans and Havana. The New Orleanian jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis will join Steven Bernstein, a stalwart trumpeter of New York’s downtown scene, and Arturo O’Farrill, the progressive Cuban-American pianist. Mr. Bernstein will be accompanied by the Hot 9, the band he co-leads with Henry Butler, another New Orleans pianist. Mr. O’Farrill will present his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Matthew Shipp Trio with Roscoe Mitchell
Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall / 9PM, $32+
“For nearly 35 years, pianist Matthew Shipp has been an omnipresent fixture of New York City’s downtown jazz circuit, working not only with his own menagerie of acclaimed ensembles but also as a contributing member to such esteemed groups as the David S. Ware Quartet and the Ivo Perelman Duo. On Saturday, he makes his debut on Manhattan’s grandest stage, when he headlines Carnegie Hall as the hallowed venue celebrates sixty-plus years of American free jazz. The night will kick off with an improvised solo recital by Shipp, after which he’ll be joined by his trio (rounded out by Michael Bisio on bass and Newman Taylor Baker on drums). Anticipation is highest, however, for the appearance of the legendary AACM saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. As a onetime member of Mitchell’s outfit the Note Factory, Shipp is no stranger to playing alongside this titan of Chicago wind. And if the combustible energy of the pair in performance at the 2005 Ai Confini tra Sardegna e Jazz festival in Italy is any indication, Carnegie Hall is likely going to rock on this night like the old Soho loft scene of the ’70s.” (Ron Hart, Village Voice)

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8 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)

>> WAYNE ESCOFFERY QUARTET
>>Orfeh and Andy Karl: Legally Bound
>> Tosca
>>Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage
>> Beer, Bourbon and Barbecue Festival
>> Chelsea “Best Exhibits” Gallery Tour
>> The New York Times Travel Show
>> A Night of Philosophy and Ideas

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Music, Dance, Performing Arts

WAYNE ESCOFFERY QUARTET (Jan. 26-28)
at Smoke / 7, 9 and 10:30PM, $38
“Mr. Escoffery, a tenor saxophonist of fluid and beaming power, is celebrating the release of “Vortex,” an album recorded with his longstanding quartet. That group — an impressive mainline jazz ensemble, with Dave Kikoski on piano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Ralph Peterson on drums — appears here, playing the Escoffery originals featured on the recording.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Tosca (Dec 31 – May 12; next April 21, 8PM, but it’s already sold out! try April 26)
The Metropolitan Opera / 1PM, $20+
“Rivaling the splendor of Franco Zeffirelli’s set and costumes of the Napoleonic era, Sir David McVicar’s ravishing new production offers a splendid backdrop for two extraordinary sopranos sharing the title role of the jealous prima donna: Sonya Yoncheva and Anna Netrebko. Vittorio Grigolo and Marcelo Álvarez alternate in the role of Tosca’s revolutionary artist lover Cavaradossi, with Bryn Terfel, Michael Volle, and Željko Lučić as the depraved police chief Scarpia. Andris Nelsons conducts.”

Orfeh and Andy Karl: Legally Bound (also Tuesday)
Feinstein’s/54 Below / 7PM< $70
“One of musical theater’s royal couples—power belter and blue-eyed-soul recording artist Orfeh (soon to be seen in Pretty Woman) and her charming husband, Rocky dreamboat Andy Karl (most recently of Groundhog Day)—share some of their love.” (TONY)

Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage (Jan 25-28)
Dizzy’s Club / 7:30PM, +9:30PM,
“With tenor saxophonist/bass clarinetist/flutist Craig Handy, trombonist Jay Ashby, pianist/accordionist Julian Shore, vocalist Fabiana Masili, percussionist Fernando Saci, and bassist/cavaquinho player/percussionist Nilson Matta

Nilson Matta is well known as the world-class bassist of Trio da Paz, but his solo career as a composer and bandleader is equally noteworthy. His albums are thoughtful aural masterpieces featuring lush harmonies and contemporary Brazilian rhythms. “Brazilian Voyage” is an apt title for tonight’s performance, as Matta’s expert knowledge of Brazilian jazz unfolds as a varied journey through the music’s traditions and contemporary explorations, demonstrating an evolution in which he continues to play a major role.”

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

Beer, Bourbon and Barbecue Festival
The Tunnel, 608 West 28th St./ session1:12pm-4pm $109; session 2: 5:30pm-9:30pm $99
“At this annual bash, stuff your face with all-you-can-eat whole-roasted pig, broken down into dishes like tender pork brisket and zesty ribs by pit-masters coming from the deep South to downtown Manhattan. Between gut-sticking platters, swig limitless pours of craft suds and hooch, including rare, twenty-year-old bourbons. Feeling bold? There’s a bacon-eating contest where you can test your marathon-eating abilities for bragging rights and swag.” (TONY)

Chelsea “Best Exhibits” Gallery Tour
New York Gallery Tours, 1PM, +3:45PM, $25
“With 300 galleries for us to choose from, this ALL-NEW tour will be our most extraordinary of the month. Highlights: (1) a South African artist’s sculpture/ painting hybrids including an innovative “forest” installation through which you will navigate, (2) ravishing paintings on silk that depict a female artist’s fascinating and startling mythologies, and (3) audacious giant robots that walk and hurl objects, among 7 exceptional exhibits in all.”

New York Gallery Tours finds the most innovative art, and leads you on an insightful, entertaining and affordable journey through the contemporary art scene.  With over 15 years of experience, thousands of clients, and a director/ guide with a Ph.D. in arts education, we’re the city’s #1 gallery tour provider!

The tour will take place no matter what the weather – rain, snow or shine (the art is all indoors). Meet at 526 W. 26th St. between 10th & 11th Ave. Nearest subways: C- or E-Train to 23rd St. SPECIAL OFFER: visit our website to request DISCOUNT tickets for $8-off admission!

The New York Times Travel Show
Javits Center / 10am, various prices
“Celebrating 15 years, the New York Times Travel Show is back with more than 550 exhibitors sharing tips of the trade. There will be live seminars featuring Zac Posen, Andrew Zimmern, Samantha Brown, Pauline Frommer and others; cultural performances; culinary demonstrations and tastings; travel advice; travel deals and more. Receive a special discount of $5 off your ticket purchase with code SOCIAL.”

Elsewhere, but this is pretty darn unique, worth the overnight detour.

A Night of Philosophy and Ideas
Brooklyn Public Library – Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza / 7PM – 7AM! FREE
“When you think of an all-night party in Brooklyn, a bunch of philosophy nerds digging into Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s exactly what’s going down at the Brooklyn Public Library’s central branch tonight.

At 7pm, the library will kick off a 12-hour marathon dubbed A Night of Philosophy and Ideas. The event, which is completely free and open to the public, will include musical performances, talks from academics on a variety of philosophical disciplines and a keynote lecture from George Yancy, a professor at Emory University and editor of the Philosophy of Race book series.

Food and beverages will be available for purchase throughout the night, though you might want to pack some trail mix to keep you going through the dozens of lectures. The night caps off at 6:30am with a presentation by Vincent Colapietro titled “The Witness of Poetry and the Poetics of Attention,” which is fitting considering that even the most ardent philosophy nerd’s attention span will be completely shot by the end of this gauntlet.” (TONY)

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PLUS the Winter Antiques Show, which will run from the 19th to the 28th. Head to the Park Avenue Armory to find one-of-a-kind finds from 70 exhibitors.” (UntappedCities)

BONUS:

Broadway Week began last week! Get two-for-one tickets to your favorite shows, from Chicago to Wicked.  NYC Restaurant Week began this week on Monday.

Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

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Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 17 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

=====================================================
Bonus NYC events– Jazz Venues:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 are underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 are within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

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♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

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NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

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WHAT’S ON VIEW
My Fave Special Exhibitions – MUSEUMS / Manhattan’s WestSide
(See the New York Times Arts Section for listings of all museums,
and also to see their expanded reviews of these exhibitions)

Museum of Modern Art:

A special pat on the back to MOMA, who is now displaying art from the seven countries affected by Trump’s travel ban.

“Trump’s ban against refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations has sparked acts of defiance in NYC, from demonstrations across town, to striking taxicab drivers at JFK to Middle Eastern bodega owners closing their shops in protest. Recently, the Museum Of Modern added its two cents by bringing out artworks it owns from the affected countries, and hanging them prominently within the galleries usually reserved for 19th- and 20th-century artworks from Europe and the United States. Paintings by Picasso and Matisse, for example, were removed to make way for pieces by Tala Madani (from Iran), Ibrahim El-Salahi (from Sudan) and architect Zaha Hadid (from Iraq). The rehanging, which was unannounced, aims to create a symbolic welcome that repudiates Trump by creating a visual dialog between the newly added works and the more familiar objects from MoMA’s permanent collection.” (TONY)

Stephen Shore (thru May 28)

“This immersive and staggeringly charming retrospective is devoted to one of the best American photographers of the past half century. Shore has peers—Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, and, especially, William Eggleston—in a generation that, in the nineteen-seventies, stormed to eminence with color film, which art photographers had long disdained. His best-known series, “American Surfaces” and “Uncommon Places,” are both from the seventies and were mostly made in rugged Western states. The pictures in these series share a quality of surprise: appearances surely unappreciated if even really noticed by anyone before—in rural Arizona, a phone booth next to a tall cactus, on which a crude sign (“GARAGE”) is mounted, and, on a small-city street in Wisconsin, a movie marquee’s neon wanly aglow, at twilight. A search for fresh astonishments has kept Shore peripatetic, on productive sojourns in Mexico, Scotland, Italy, Ukraine, and Israel. He has remained a vestigial Romantic, stopping in space and 
time to frame views that exert a peculiar tug on him. This framing is resolutely formalist: subjects composed laterally, from edge to edge, and in depth. There’s never a “background.” The most distant element is as considered as the nearest. But only when looking for it are you conscious of Shore’s formal discipline, because it is as fluent as a language learned from birth. His best pictures at once arouse feelings and leave us alone to make what we will of them. He delivers truths, whether hard or easy, with something very like mercy.” (NewYorker)

Whitney Museum

Laura Owens (thru Feb.04)

© Laura Owens

“In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Owens heralded the comeback of painting with a succession of unbelievably cool, well-timed canvases that breezily dispensed with outdated notions of style, gesture, and the mutual exclusivity of formalism and illusionistic space. And she’s made news ever since: this welcome mid-career retrospective neatly charts the hairpin turns of the Los Angeles artist’s rigorous, funny, and very influential career thus far. A mischievously austere painting, from 1997, shows a blue expanse interrupted by seagulls, nominally and stickily rendered, as if piped on with black icing. The artist undercuts our understanding of “sky,” though, by airbrushing the birds’ shadows onto her monochrome. While it’s not so hard to believe that the tricky collisions of painterly quotation from the next few years are from the same artist, by 2002, when Owens deploys decorative painting in an enchanting woodland scene, we’re in a different world; then we’re in another, with her abstractions of chewed-up grids, digital brushstrokes, and sculptural, stuccolike blobs. The through line, of course, is her passionate loyalty to the medium itself, but, as demonstrated by the exhibition’s finale—an installation of two-sided, freestanding paintings, from 2015—she’s not afraid to move off the wall; it’s anyone’s guess what comes next.” (NewYorker)

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For other selected Museum and Gallery Special Exhibitions see Recent Posts in right Sidebar dated 01/25 and 01/23.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/26) + Today’s Featured Pub (Times Square / Theater District)

Posted on 01/26/2018 by GregD

Today’s Sweet 6 NYC Events > FRIDAY/ JANUARY 26, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
===========================================================

Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

Cloud Cult
The Appel Room, Jazz @ Lincoln Center / 8:30PM, $30–$100
“The Minnesota band Cloud Cult, fronted by Craig Minowa, is the very definition of “extra.” Armed with at least eight members and many more instruments, Minowa has spent two decades releasing epic, often conceptual albums comprised of acoustic folk, experimental rock, electronica, sweeping orchestral flourishes, and pop turns, all overlayed with deeply emotional lyrics that address subjects like existential loss. Somehow, it works, and, over their career, Cloud Cult have developed, well, a cult following. Their live shows are near-religious experiences, complete with a live painter who auctions off his ad hoc work after each performance. They will more than fill the gorgeous Appel Room space overlooking Columbus Circle.” (Sophie Weiner, Village Voice)

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5 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)
>>Orfeh and Andy Karl: Legally Bound
>> Il Trovatore
>>Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage
>>Benny Golson
>> City of Tomorrow Summit
=========================================================

Music, Dance, Performing Arts

Orfeh and Andy Karl: Legally Bound (also Sat; Tue)
Feinstein’s/54 Below / 7PM< $70
“One of musical theater’s royal couples—power belter and blue-eyed-soul recording artist Orfeh (soon to be seen in Pretty Woman) and her charming husband, Rocky dreamboat Andy Karl (most recently of Groundhog Day)—share some of their love.” (TONY)

Il Trovatore (Jan 22-Feb 15; next performance Jan.30, 7:30PM)
The Metropolitan Opera House / 8PM, $
“Sir David McVicar’s production of Verdi’s thrilling depiction of life on the edgeexhilarating production features Jennifer Rowley as the noble heroine, Leonora, Yonghoon Lee as the troubadour who loves her, Quinn Kelsey as his rival, and Anita Rachvelishvili as the Gypsy Azucena, whose bloodthirsty curse propels the story.”

Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage (Jan 25-28)
Dizzy’s Club / 7:30PM, +9:30PM,
“With tenor saxophonist/bass clarinetist/flutist Craig Handy, trombonist Jay Ashby, pianist/accordionist Julian Shore, vocalist Fabiana Masili, percussionist Fernando Saci, and bassist/cavaquinho player/percussionist Nilson Matta

Nilson Matta is well known as the world-class bassist of Trio da Paz, but his solo career as a composer and bandleader is equally noteworthy. His albums are thoughtful aural masterpieces featuring lush harmonies and contemporary Brazilian rhythms. “Brazilian Voyage” is an apt title for tonight’s performance, as Matta’s expert knowledge of Brazilian jazz unfolds as a varied journey through the music’s traditions and contemporary explorations, demonstrating an evolution in which he continues to play a major role.”

Benny Golson (Jan. 24-27)
Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St./ 7:30PM, 9:30PM, $35
“A living link to the golden era of nineteen-fifties hard bop, the saxophonist and composer Golson can still extract riches from a ballad and stir up trouble, as exhibited on his most recent release, the 2016 album “Horizon Ahead.” If the eighty-nine-year-old Golson unleashes but one of the durable classics he’s written, such as “Killer Joe,” “I Remember Clifford,” and “Whisper Not,” it’ll be a memorable event.” (NewYorker)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

City of Tomorrow Summit
92nd Street Y / 5pm, tickets from $50
“Have you ever wondered what the new Penn Station will look like? The Vessel at Hudson Yards? Well here’s your chance at the “City of Tomorrow” Summit at 92Y featuring architects, real estate developers and designers. Join panel discussions and interactive workshops, learn about plans for transportation hubs at JFK and LaGuardia airports, attend seminars on real estate secrets, sustainable design and much more. One or two-day passes are available.”

——————————————————————————————————

PLUS the Winter Antiques Show, which will run from the 19th to the 28th. Head to the Park Avenue Armory to find one-of-a-kind finds from 70 exhibitors.” (UntappedCities)

BONUS:

Broadway Week began last week! Get two-for-one tickets to your favorite shows, from Chicago to Wicked.  NYC Restaurant Week began this week on Monday.

Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

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Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 18 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

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Bonus NYC Events – Music Venues:
So much fine live music every night in this town. These are my favorite non jazz music venues, almost all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who’s playing tonight:

City Winery – 155 Varick St., citywinery.com, 212-608-0555
Feinstein’s/54 Below – 254 W54th St., 54below.com, 646-476-3551
Joe’s Pub @ Public Theater – 425 Lafayette St., joespub.com, 212-967-7555
Metropolitan Room – 34W22ndSt., metropolitan room.com, 212-206-0440
Beacon Theatre – 2124 Broadway @ 74th St., beacontheatre.com, 212-465-6500
Town Hall – 123 W43rd St., thetownhall.org, 212-997-6661
B.B. King’s Blues Bar – 237W42nd St., bbkingblues.com, 212-997-2144
Bowery Ballroom – 6 Delancey St. boweryballroom.com,
Le Poisson Rouge – 158 Bleecker St., lepoissonrouge.com, 212-505-3474

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. caffevivaldi.com, 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

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♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

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NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

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A PremierPub

Jimmy’s Corner / 140 W 44th St (btw B’way & 7th ave)

IMG_2083Jimmy’s Corner is right in the heart of Times Square, but you won’t find it on the corner, it’s mid-block. Enter this long narrow bar and you are struck by the walls covered with mostly black-and-white boxing photographs, and memorabilia. Soon enough you learn that “Corner” refers to proprietor Jimmy Glenn’s long career as a corner man for some of boxing greats – Liston, Tyson, even “the greatest,” Ali.

Jimmy’s is a sort of time machine, taking you back to a time and place that no longer exists. All around you Times Square has cleaned up, grown up, assumed a new identity. Jimmy’s probably hasn’t changed a bit since it first opened in 1971. Certainly the bar itself looks original and the prices haven’t changed much either. When I brought a friend, who owns her own bar, she was surprised when she got the small tab for a round of drinks. Figured there must be a mistake, that maybe they forgot to charge for all the drinks.

Times Square today is filled with neon glitz and wandering tourists from Dubuque, but not Jimmy’s. You’ll likely find some old timer’s at the bar nursing their drinks, some younger locals at tables in the back, and maybe a few adventuresome tourists clutching their trusty guidebooks. There’s no food served here because this is just a bar, and sometimes that’s all you need.

On nights when no local team is playing, it’s a fine place to sip some drafts and listen to a great old time jukebox, with a great selection of  40s& 50s R&B and soul. On sports nights this very narrow bar can get a bit claustrophobic, filled with excited fans watching their team on the TVs. Either way, Jimmy’s is the place to be if you are looking for an old time bar in the new Times Square.
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Website: are you kidding !
(although there is a facebook page with lots of photos –
facebook.com/jimmyscornernyc)
Phone #: 212-221-9510
Hours: 11am – 4 am, except Sunday they open 12 noon
Happy Hour: not necessary, low prices all day, every day
Subway: #1,2,3 to TimesSquare 42nd st
walk 2 blks N on 7th ave to 44th st; ½ blk E to Jimmy’s

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“Pub” is used in it’s broadest sense – bars, bar/restaurants, jazz clubs, wine bars, tapas bars, craft beer bars, dive bars, cocktail lounges, and of course, pubs – just about anyplace you can get a drink without a cover charge (except for certain jazz clubs).
If you have a fave premier pub or good eating place on Manhattan’s WestSide let us all know about it – leave a comment.
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NYC Events,”Only the Best” (01/25) + GallerySpecialExhibits: Chelsea

Posted on 01/25/2018 by GregD

Today’s Elite 8 NYC Events > THURSDAY/ JANUARY 25, 2018

“We search the internet everyday looking for the very best of What’s Happening, primarily on Manhattan’s WestSide, so that you don’t have to.” We make it as easy as 1-2-3.

For future NYC Events better check the tab above: “NYC Events-January”
It’s the most comprehensive list of top events this month that you will find anywhere.
Carefully curated from “Only the Best” NYC event info on the the web, it’s a simply superb resource that will help you plan your NYC visit all over town, all through the month.
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Have time for only one NYC Event today? Do this:

Lincoln Center’s Great Performers (October 18, 2017 – May 19, 2018)
Rolston String Quartet
Rubenstein Atrium, Lincoln Center/ 7:30PM, FREE, better get there early for a seat.
“First-prize winner of the 2016 Banff International String Quartet Competition, this ensemble of “astonishing harmonic maturity” (Calgary Herald) makes its Lincoln Center debut in a performance of stylistic verve and impeccable musicianship.”

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7 OTHER TOP NYC EVENTS TODAY (see below for full listing)
>>‘JAZZ LEGENDS FOR DISABILITY PRIDE
>>Mike Longo & Paul West
>> Jackie Hoffman
>>Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage
>>Benny Golson
>> Bitter Allies: China and North Korea
>> Happiness Is a Choice You Make”
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Music, Dance, Performing Arts

JAZZ LEGENDS FOR DISABILITY PRIDE
The Sheen Center / 7:30PM, $100
“This annual benefit for Disability Pride NYC features an impressive lineup of elders and luminaries, including the saxophonist George Coleman, the pianist Kenny Barron, the drummer Jimmy Cobb and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The organization, which also organizes the annual Disability Pride Parade, was founded by Mike LeDonne, a pianist whose daughter, Mary, is disabled due to Praeder-Willi Syndrome.” (NYT-GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO)

Mike Longo & Paul West
Mezzrow, 163 W. 10th St,/ 8PM, 9:30PM, $20
“Dizzy Gillespie’s ensembles of the nineteen-sixties were a breeding ground for such formidable players as James Moody and Kenny Barron, and also for less heralded but vital figures like Longo, a longtime Gillespie pianist, and the bassist West. They unite here for a snug duet.” (NewYorker)

Jackie Hoffman
The Appel Room, Jazz @ Lincoln Center / 8:30PM, $75+
“Long on comic talent and vocal power, short on patience with many things, actor and comedian Jackie Hoffman is one of the stage and screen’s favorite scene stealers. After shining in supporting roles in Hairspray, Xanadu, The Addams Family, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, she made the transition to leading lady in last year’s critically acclaimed Off-Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress. She is also a fan favorite at Joe’s Pub, where she has performed a string of bawdy, vaudevillian solo shows, including The Kvetching Continues, the venue’s longest-running show of all time. Fresh off her Emmy-nominated performance as Mamacita in FX’s Feud: Bette and Joan, the Theatre World Award and Obie-winning Hoffman takes over The Appel Room for a night of show tunes, covers, original songs, and “kvetching on an operatic scale” (New York Times).”

Nilson Matta’s Brazilian Voyage (Jan 25-28)
Dizzy’s Club / 7:30PM, +9:30PM,
“With tenor saxophonist/bass clarinetist/flutist Craig Handy, trombonist Jay Ashby, pianist/accordionist Julian Shore, vocalist Fabiana Masili, percussionist Fernando Saci, and bassist/cavaquinho player/percussionist Nilson Matta

Nilson Matta is well known as the world-class bassist of Trio da Paz, but his solo career as a composer and bandleader is equally noteworthy. His albums are thoughtful aural masterpieces featuring lush harmonies and contemporary Brazilian rhythms. “Brazilian Voyage” is an apt title for tonight’s performance, as Matta’s expert knowledge of Brazilian jazz unfolds as a varied journey through the music’s traditions and contemporary explorations, demonstrating an evolution in which he continues to play a major role.”

Benny Golson (Jan. 24-27)
Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St./ 7:30PM, 9:30PM, $35
“A living link to the golden era of nineteen-fifties hard bop, the saxophonist and composer Golson can still extract riches from a ballad and stir up trouble, as exhibited on his most recent release, the 2016 album “Horizon Ahead.” If the eighty-nine-year-old Golson unleashes but one of the durable classics he’s written, such as “Killer Joe,” “I Remember Clifford,” and “Whisper Not,” it’ll be a memorable event.” (NewYorker)

Smart Stuff / Other NYC Events
(Lectures/Discussions, Book Talks, Film, Classes, Food & Drink, Other)

Bitter Allies: China and North Korea
Asia Society and Museum, 725 Park Ave. / 6:30PM, $40
“Delve into one of Asia’s most complex relationships at this event on “bitter allies” China and North Korea and what role China could play in the ongoing North Korean conflict.” (ThoughtGallery.org)

Elsewhere, but this looks worth the detour.

Book Talk: “Happiness Is a Choice You Make”
Brooklyn Historical Society, 128 Pierrepont St./ 6:30PM, $5
“Journalist John Leland has gathered “Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old.” His findings: among the 85 and up set, life is richer than the stereotypes suggest. Leland joins fellow journalist Julie Scelfo to talk about the wisdom and contentment he found, and the degree to which we can influence the quality of our own lives.” (ThoughtGallery.org)

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PLUS the Winter Antiques Show, which will run from the 19th to the 28th. Head to the Park Avenue Armory to find one-of-a-kind finds from 70 exhibitors.” (UntappedCities)

The world’s top-ranked squash players compete at The J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions in Grand Central Terminal.
TODAY: Women’s Finals 7PM, Men’s Finals 8PM

BONUS:

Broadway Week began last week! Get two-for-one tickets to your favorite shows, from Chicago to Wicked.  NYC Restaurant Week began this week on Monday.

Try  a double header. “NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week will overlap this winter, creating the perfect storm of events where you can sit down indoors. NYC Broadway Week begins first with two-for-one tickets to the best shows from January 16 through February 4. NYC Restaurant Week joins in on January 22, and it runs through February 9, offering lunches for $29 and dinner for $42.”

See TONY magazine:  Your guide to combining NYC Broadway Week and NYC Restaurant Week

=========================================================

Continuing Events

‘MICHELANGELO: DIVINE DRAFTSMAN AND DESIGNER’
Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Feb. 12).

”A monument to a monument. With 133 drawings by the beyond-famous artist on loan from some 50 front-rank collections, this show is a curatorial coup and an art historical tour de force: a panoptic view of a titanic career as recorded in the most fragile of media: paper, chalk and ink. And it demands that you be fully present. Drawing is more than a graphic experience; it’s a textural one, about the pressure of crayon and pen on a page; the subliminal fade and focus of lines; the weave and shadow-creating swells of surfaces. These are effects that can’t be captured by a smartphone.” (Cotter-NYT)
212-535-7710, metmuseum.org

The art world has been agog about this exhibition for sometime. One critic after another exclaims that it is the “Exhibition of a lifetime!” The hype has been over the top. Usually that means you’ll be disappointed when you actually experience it, because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. Not this time.

This is a huge and marvelous exhibition that shows the evolution of Michelangelo from a young artist to a mature, divine genius. An exhibition that you will remember for sometime. Even the works of other artists that are included for contrast and context are amazing.

Here are a few reviews from the critics to give you a fuller flavor of this exhibition. They strongly encourage you to make the time to see this “once in a lifetime” exhibition. I also encourage you to see it.

Only 19 days left, because the exhibition closes February 12, and that last week it will probably be crazy packed.

==========================================

Let there be light!
Erwin Redl’s Whiteout, a newly commissioned public art project, will light up in Madison Square Park. It consists of hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a white LED light, and suspended from a square grid of steel poles. The swaying sequence of light will be on display until April 2018.

=====================================================
Bonus NYC events– Jazz Venues:
Many consider NYCity the Jazz capital of the world. Here are my favorite Jazz clubs, all on Manhattan’s WestSide. Check out who is playing tonight:

Greenwich Village:
(5 are underground, classic jazz joints. all 6 are within walking distance of each other):
Village Vanguard – UG, 178 7th Ave. South, villagevanguard.com, 212-255-4037
Blue Note – 131 W3rd St. nr 6th ave. bluenotejazz.com, 212-475-8592
55 Bar – basement @55 Christopher St. nr 7th ave.S. 55bar.com, 212-929-9883
Mezzrow – basement @ 163 W10th St. nr 7th Ave. mezzrow.com,646-476-4346
Smalls – basement @ 183 W10th St. smallslive.com, 646-476-4346
Cornelia Street Cafe – UG, 29 Cornelia St. corneliastreetcafe.com, 212-989-9319

Outside Greenwich Village:
Dizzy’s Club – Broadway @ 60th St. — jazz.org/dizzys / 212-258-9595
Birdland – 315 W44th St.(btw 8/9ave) — birdlandjazz.com / 212-581-3080
Smoke Jazz Club – 2751 Broadway nr.106th St. — smokejazz.com / 212-864-6662

Special Mention:
Caffe Vivaldi – 32 Jones St. nr Bleecker St. — caffevivaldi.com / 212-691-7538
a classic, old jazz club in the Village, Caffe V often surprises with a wonderfully eclectic lineup. It’s my favorite spot for an evening of listening enjoyment and discovery.

==================================================================================
♦ Before making final plans, we suggest you call the venue to confirm ticket availability, dates and times, as schedules are subject to change.
♦ NYCity, with a population of  8.5 million, had a record 60 million visitors last year and was TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice Top U.S. Destination for 2017.  Quality shows draw crowds.
Try to reserve seats for these top NYC events in advance, even if just on day of performance.

===========================================================

NYCity Vacation Travel Guide Video (Expedia):

================================================================================

Chelsea Art Gallery District*

Chelsea is the heart of the NYCity contemporary art scene. Home to more than 300 art galleries, the Rubin Museum, the Joyce Theater and The Kitchen performance spaces, there is no place like it anywhere in the world. Come here to browse free exhibitions by world-renowned artists and those unknowns waiting to be discovered in an art district that is concentrated between West 18th and West 27th Streets, and 10th and 11th Avenues. Afterwards stop in the Chelsea Market, stroll on the High Line, or rest up at one of the many cafes and bars and discuss the fine art.

Gordon Parks: I Am You, Part 1
New views from a late visionary.
The first installment of two, this show devoted to the great photographer of the civil-rights movement focuses on lesser-known work from the ’50s and ’60s, like portraits of artists including Calder and Giacometti and vérité fashion photography that paved the way for today’s street-style portraiture.
Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street. Opens January 11.(NYMagazine)

Here is an exhibition the New Yorker likes:

“The Shadow Archive: An Investigation Into Vernacular Portrait Photography”

Walther Collection, 526 W. 26th St. (thru Mar.31)

“The first in a multiyear series of shows about photographs made for commercial or practical purposes, curated by Brian Wallis, considers the portrait. Most of the images date to the nineteenth century; all of them fit into typologies. Fifteen tintypes of “workers with tools of their trade” include a barber, a piano tuner, and a sword swallower; several mug shots attributed to the California sheriff Thomas Cunningham are so picturesque that they could be mistaken for stills from a Hollywood period piece. Passport photographers across Africa take full-length portraits and cut out the heads, leaving behind accidental studies of fashion. A mesmerizing series of such discards, shown here, were taken against a red background in Gulu, Uganda, and collected by the Italian-born journalist Martina Bacigalupo. A found group of forty-eight color snapshots of migrant farmworkers, each holding up a paper number—their source is unknown—takes the idea of identifying documents in a more chilling direction.”

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For a listing of 25 essential galleries in the Chelsea Art Gallery District, organized by street, which enables you to create your own Chelsea Art Gallery crawl, see the Chelsea Gallery Guide (nycgo.com) Or check out TONY magazine’s list of the “Best Chelsea Galleries” and click through to see what’s on view.

*Now plan your own gallery crawl, but better to plan your visits for Tuesday through Saturday; most galleries are closed Sunday and Monday.

TIP: After your gallery tour, stop in Ovest at 513W27th St. for Aperitivo Italiano (Happy Hour on steroids). Discuss all the great art you have viewed over a drink and a very tasty selection of FREE appetizers (M-F, 5-8pm). OR try the NYT recommendation: “When you’re done, adjourn to the newly renovated Bottino , the Chelsea art world’s unofficial canteen on 10th Avenue (btw 24/25 St.) “

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For other selected Museum and Gallery Special Exhibitions see recent posts in right sidebar dated 01/23 and 01/21.

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