Meshell Ndegeocello is perhaps best known for her duet with John Mellencamp on “Wild Night.” But she is a musical force all her own, mixing R&B with Jazz, Noise Rock, Hip Hop, and whatever the hell else she feels like doing. She plays a mean bass and is responsible for Bitter, one of the best “I’ve just been dumped and no one feels my pain” albums ever.

Trixie Whitley is the opening act. She is the daughter of Chris Whitley, a restless spirit of a blues man who shared Meshell’s omnivorous musical appetite. Trixie learned to play drums at 11 and has been through music, DJing, acting and dance and has only now reached her twenties. Should be interesting to see what she is doing now.
map & direc

5/19/8
Early Show
Meshell Ndegeocello in Arthur and The Coopers 7:30
Trixie Whitley 6:30
Mercury Lounge
217 E. Houston St. (corner Ave A & Houston)
212-260-4700
Box Office Hours for no-fee advance tickets: Mon-Sat, Noon-7 pm

Kites are something we should never grow out of. Like ending sentences with prepositions, or sentence fragments. Seriously, this promises to be a great way for everyone who claims North Brooklyn as home to get the kids out of the house and get flying. Live entertainment will include The Hungry March Band, I.S. 318 Marching Band, Bubble do Beatles, Audra Rox, Lulu and the Amazing Jeske, Greenpoint Shotokan Karate and Metro Dance. There will be delicious food and goodies on hand at the “neighborhood cafe”, and a kite hospital for your injured flyer. And it’s free.

Saturday, 5/17/8
Noon - 5pm
Rain Date June 8th
@ McCarren Park
North 12th St. @ Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
FREE!

Bikes rule. So do intact skulls, so wear a helmet, doofus.

This Friday is National Bike to Work Day. There are all kinds of reasons to bike to work Here are just a few:

* Less air pollution. Every gallon of gasoline we burn creates about 20 pounds of climate change-causing CO2.
* Shaping up. Casual biking burns about 173 calories per hour.
* Money. A typical U.S. family spends nearly $8,000 per year operating a car, while a bike might cost $50 for an annual tune-up.

And the most important reason: the more people who start riding bikes to their jobs, the smaller the percentage of people riding bikes as their jobs. Why does that matter? Because messengers and delivery folk are the ones most likely to give everyone else a bad name by going the wrong way down one way streets, running red lights, and giving pedestrians heart attacks by coming within 1/32 of an inch of us. I said most likely, not guaranteed, so all of you safety-minded pro bikers please put that angry-letter-writing-energy into getting your less responsible peers to grow up. And that is today’s rant. Thank you so much.

We are committed to introducing new talents, as well as showcasing established artists and photographers in each issue. We also strive to bring our readers new, powerful and important trends in the art world. Please contact us if you or someone you know is breaking barriers, or creating a movement. Fame is not a prerequisite–talent is.

Weisler’s photography of the ever-changing urban landscape reflects the transience and impermanence of street art. Concentrating on the evolving nature of layered graffiti, Weisler captures a timeline of competing artistic efforts and messages.

The result is a rich compendium of texture, color and form that showcases both organic energy and urban decay. This is a unique expression of environmental art as voiced by competing images and agendas, all of which are invariably undone and made all the more beautifully weary by time and weather. Her educational background includes a diploma in fine art from New York City’s Music and Art High School and a B.A. cum laude in Art from CCNY. She also completed a year’s study of Art Historiography and Criticism from the University of Essex, England and holds a MBA in the Arts from SUNY Binghamton.

Weisler is a New York City based photographer whose perspectives on street art have been featured in a video at The Wooster Collective’s 11 Spring Street exhibition. Her work is featured on Charles Saatchi’s gallery site, in New York’s MTA Image Registry, as part of Chelsea’s SOHO20 Gallery 13th Annual International Women’s Exhibition and in several private collections. You may contact her here.

Cherry Heart Continue Reading »

Retroactive 1, 1963, by Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised a Christian fundamentalist. At first, Rauschenberg wanted to be a minister but gave it up because his church banned dancing. After serving in the Navy, where he drew portraits of his fellow sailors to send home to their families, he used money from the GI Bill to study painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and, later, New York City’s own Art Students League. He would come to blur the line between painting and sculpture by using found objects and household materials (”Bed” used toothpaste and fingernail polish along with paint) in what he would call “combines.” This in itself wasn’t entirely new, but the way that he used prosaic or discarded materials to celebrate their inherent beauty rather than to make a comment on the crassness of commercialism was new indeed.

Rauschenberg’s generous eye for everyday beauty was matched by his philanthropic generosity - he donated millions to various charities and had recently established Change Inc., an organization which helps artists pay their medical bills - as well as by his hunger for new ideas. He was not known for consciously developing a consistent body of work; rather, he would constantly try new things, taking more pleasure in the process of creation than in the end result.

He divided his time between New York and Florida. Like so many people who have stepped off of a bus from small towns like Port Arthur, Robert Rauschenberg came to this city to discover what he was made of. Like Walt Whitman, another gay creative type who helped put us on the map, he found that he was infinite, he contained multitudes.