Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a new campaign, Just Ask The Locals, "the City's first-ever five-borough marketing and advertising campaign to make visitors feel more welcome, thank them for visiting, and help them navigate New York City." The Mayor made the announcement at the new American Airlines terminal at JFK and said, "New Yorkers have always been welcoming and friendly, but not enough people around the world know it. So now we're going the extra mile......

New Yorkers rate their critics in this weeks Time Out New York issue. The somewhat figure skating like rating system was based on "K=Knowledge S=Style T=Taste A=Accessibility I=Influence AVG=Average score". Some of the winners: • Sasha Frere-Jones took first place in music criticism for his work in the The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Village Voice and others. We like his blog, too. • Jerry Saltz of the Village Voice took the gold......

- Some failed campaigns that misused their city funding now owe nearly $2 million. - A federal judge has been getting into some trouble for holding proceedings in her robing room. - From Upper West Side stables to garages to, you guessed it, condos. - Yes, NY has lots of Presidential hopefulls. Emphasis on hopeful. - Chuck Close wants his natural light, which is nice and we wish him luck... but, well, so does......

There's yet another interesting bit in this weeks City section FYI column, this time on one of our fair city's old school private clubs, the Century Association. Housed in a land-marked 1891 McKim Mead & White Beaux Arts building on W. 43rd street the association (also called the Century Club) was "originally an arts and letters society founded in 1847." The invitation-only club admitted its first female members in 1988 and currently has around......

Bruce Levingston, Clasical Pianist...

Inventive Fashion Photographs by Chuck Close, Annie Leibovitz, Vik Muniz is an exhibit of the three photographers work on assignments for mainstream glossy magazines. Their trademark styles mingle with the editorial assignment – expanding beyond the boundaries given to them. Included in the exhibit are W Magazine's September 2003 tribute to Kate Moss, where she is photographed with an unmade-up face and body. A fashion spread not used to bring in advertisers and/or sell product?!......

Kate Wood, executive director, LANDMARK WEST!...

There are tons of cultural events going on this week as a response to the convention, such as this past weekend's Margaret Cho performances at the Apollo, the giant red megaphone at 60 Centre Street here all this week, or the Thalia Follies revue at Symphony Space every night of the convention. Check out what the Imagine Festival has planned for tonight, and we must tip our hats to tomorrow's panel discussion on The State......

With many major thoroughfares closed down on Saturday, as the Olympic torch wound through the city, Gothamist felt a bit of city pride. To us, the torch relay represented all the great things about the Olympics (the tradition, the ideal of sportsmanship, the world coming together) and left the bad associations (doping scandals, IOC bribery, the corporate machine), with a mix of well-known and regular (yet still extraordinary) New Yorkers running through the streets of......

The Olympic Torch Relay in NY is on: Already, P. Diddy missed his chance due to traffic and Chuck Close, who is wheelchair bound, told the AP, "I am going to be rolling, not running. So it is going to be interesting to see how I keep my beard from catching on fire." You can see the torch relay at these locations (6th Avenue and 14th Street around 4-5PM; ending in Times Square later this......

The NY Times's Public Lives column interviews Jameson Gong (pictured; photo from Librado Romero for the Times), one of the torchbearers tomorrow of the Olympic flame. An immigrant from Hong Kong who has never lived outside of Chinatown (except for his time at Syracuse), the Times describes his time at Stuyvesant:All six excelled at their studies, creating a Gong dynasty of sorts at the highly selective Stuyvesant High School. "My mom gave us two choices,"......

The best part of the Olympics might be the torch relay on June 19th in New York, especially since construction is still not completed in Athens. The Mayor announced the torch bearers today, and by far, the coolest torch bearer is artist Chuck Close. Awesome! There are a number of athletes during the relay (Dikembe Mutombo, Stephon Marbury, Boomer Esiason, Sarah Hughes), as well as educators (Columbia's Lee Bollinger, CUNY's Roscoe Brown Jr), a Diddy-of-all-trades,......

Clay Shirky...

Fine, New York Times and W magazine, Gothamist surrenders: Kate Moss transcends fashion and she's some sort of other icon. That combination of sour supermodel personality, past A-list celebrity relationship, and questionable friendships do make Kate Moss more famous than just clothes hanger. So the face and body that launched at least a thousand eating disorders is deified via a 40-page spread in W magazine where seventeen artists and photographers had to reimagine the......