Results tagged “christiansciencemonitor”

Meet Sam Ellis, Broadway’s esteemed “technical wizard”, who is in charge of all the myriad effects in Young Frankenstein, which is rumored to have cost between $16 million and $20 million – about twice the price of the average Broadway musical. A big part of that budget was poured into making the adaptation “more zowie!” than the movie. According to a profile in Christian Science Monitor, some of Ellis’s responsibilities include overseeing: A Tesla coil...

We'd been eyeing the huge book, New Art City, which is about American artists hitting their stride in the mid-20th century New York City. However, we were concerned that at 665 pages, we would throw out our back carrying it back home from the store (or cause UPS to slip a disc) and then it would break out coffee table. John Updike reviewed it this weekend in the NY Times Book Review, and he assuaged our fears: "This is not a coffee-table art book; its illustrations, though numerous, are small, and black-and-white. A dense text rules the textbook-sized pages - 557 of them, not counting notes, acknowledgments and index." The book looks at the famous - Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd - and the lesser known - Hans Hofmann, Joan Mitchell, Fairfield Porter, and John Graham. Author Jed Perl will be speaking at a few events here, so it should be interesting if you're at all interested in modern American art.

As we sweat our way from office to subway, subway to home, front door to the air conditioner's dial, let us remember another hot day in NYC's history: The Blackout of 1977. We're about to start reading Blackout by James Goodman, which reconstructs moments of the blackout, as well as ponders why the riots occured. Con Ed has been saying that we should be okay in terms of power for this summer - Gothamist hopes that Ohio is watching its power system, given what we know from 2003's blackout.