Another clash of the art world and the religious reich is going down in the East Village. The AP reports that a "Roman Catholic watchdog group is protesting a student art exhibition that includes vulgar depictions of religious symbols including a crucifix and rosary." Just how does one depict a rosary as vulgar? There are ways:The target of the protest is a series of paintings by Felipe Baeza. One of them depicts a man with......

Later today ABC will join together Barack Obama with the ladies of The View. While they tell us the main focus of their interview segment is on the "controversial remarks of Reverend Jeremiah Wright" (something that Elizabeth Hasselbeck has slammed him for in the past), one of the clips shows Barbara Walters telling Obama he is, "very sexy looking." At which point the presidential candidate needs to fan himself from the 78-year-old news legend's......

Photograph of Bloomberg introducing Obama at the Cooper Union this morning by Alex Brandon/AP Presidential hopeful Barack Obama will be speaking in NYC today, as part of Cooper Union Dialogue Series. And Mayor Bloomberg's office "took the highly unusual step" of issuing a release letting the media know Bloomberg would be introducing Obama. Aw, that's what any billionaire mayor would do for his breakfast buddy! Though Bloomberg hasn't decided on supporting a presidential candidate......

A rendering for a building that will replace a Cooper Union engineering building has emerged (above). Designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, the 440,000-square-foot mixed-use building will replace the brown tribute to banality that currently hunkers across from the historic 1859 Cooper Union Foundation building. The 51 Astor Place building is to be demolished; the fate of the connected Starbucks (between Third and Fouth Avenues) is uncertain. The Observer says the proposed building “will......

People have been wondering about former mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign for a long time (his presidential campaign plan notebook went missing last January! he pays more attention to his friends' advice versus that of election consultants). Now, with the Florida primary on the horizon, it seems his New York-based supporters are starting to worry. The first few weeks of the new year have brought Giuliani embarrassing finishes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan as......

The best part of Mayor Bloomberg's maybe, maybe-not presidential aspirations is that we can debate about whether they are going to happen until the Democratic and Republican conventions next year! The NY Times now reports that the "excitement seems to have fizzled" about the idea of Candidate Bloomberg. It's a bit more detailed that Dan Rather's August proclamation that the Mayor would not run for president. Why? Mainly because of the "mayor’s unorthodox approach to......

Mayor Bloomberg is back from London, just in time to deliver an address at Cooper Union while the world's media is milling about NYC for the U.N.'s General Assembly. Bloomberg will be appearing as part of a panel near Astor Place to discuss national policy matters. According to The New York Sun, an online site is attracting a growing number of supporters to draft Mayor Bloomberg as a third party candidate in the 2008 Presidential......

From 1910 until 1963, when New York actually had a Pennsylvania Station instead of a dingy 1960s subterranean rat warren beneath a hockey rink and office towers, twenty-two stone eagles stood guard over the McKim, Mead, and White masterpiece. The eagles themselves, along with almost all the other stone artwork on the station were the work of artist Adolph A. Weinman, who among other things created Civic Fame atop the Municipal Building and the......

You'd imagine that Kevin Burke, the chairman, president, and CEO of Con Ed, would want to attend at City Council meeting about the steam pipe explosion on July 18. But, no, Burke isn't showing up, which annoys many Council members. The Sun has a good look at the head of the city's essential and currently reviled utility. Though the Sun couldn't get a comment from Con Ed about Burke's absence (SVP of central operations William......

One firefighters' group is taking their attacks on Rudy Giuliani's record to the videotape. The International Association of Fire Fighters, which worked with the Uniformed Firefighters Association (already a vocal critic of Giuliani) and Uniformed Fire Officers Association, produced a video called Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend. It's roughly 13 minutes of explaining how Giuliani's action led to firefighters' deaths during September 11. UFA president Stephen Cassidy told the Sun, "We're just setting the record......

Don't miss the Observer story that asks City Hall beat reporters what they think of Bloomberg and the possibility of him running for President. The Times' Michael Powell observes, "There comes a point in every Mayor’s political life where they start to get bored with the city and start to kind of look around at what’s next." Yeah, he must be pretty bored to head to swing state Missouri for a speech next month. The......

Congratulations to everyone graduating this month! As NYU's commencement was today, with speaker jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, we decided to list the many NYC commencement speakers, with help from The Chronicle of Higher Education (if we've missed any or gotten it wrong, let us know in comments): Barnard College: Anna Deveare Smith, playwright-actress CUNY Lehman College: Representative Charles Rangel CUNY Brooklyn College: Roberta S. Matthews, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Brooklyn......

Last night, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 5-4 to propose rent hikes for rent-stabilized apartments on the order of 2-4.5% for one-year leases and 4-7.5% for two-years leases. Loft rent increases would be 2-4% for one-year leases, 4-7% for two-year leases. The NY Times says these proposed increases "could mean smaller increases than last year’s," and the Post says the increases could fall in the "middle range" of about 3.25% and 5.75%. Last year, the......

Wow, some very wild data from the U.S. Census about the make-up of New York. Accordin to the NY Times, the number of Manhattan children under the age of 5 has increased by more than 32%, and half of that growth is attributed to wealthy white families. And get this:The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005, which......

January -- all month: 34th Street Food and Wine Festival Several restaurants in the 34th Street area will be offering special menus with wine pairings for $20.07 for lunch and $34.00 for dinner. Check the 34th Street Partnership website for a full list of participants. January 6: Rosca de Reyes at Maya and Pampano Maya and Pampano restaurants will be serving Rosca de Reyes, or King's Cake, in honor of the Feast of the Epiphany.......

Have you seen Caroline Woolard's giant tin can telephone, the blue seats she placed around town as part of the ConFlux festival...or found some of her released hair? If you don't already know her, this artist creates "platforms for experience". Above, you can watch a clip from her (genius!) subway swing project. From her blog: "Here is my swing for the subway, disguised as a bag. With 1000 mesh "L-train grey" cordura, webbing, sliders,......

+ Following the release of the Atlantic Yards' Final Environmental Impact Statement, Empire State Development Corporation head Charles Gargano says Madison Square Garden owners Jim and Charles Dolan may end up killing the Gehry-designed project. More FEIS digesting from Curbed. + Eero Saarinen's former TWA terminal is empty and the Port Authority is soliciting requests for proposals. To the dismay of a Municipal Art Society VIP. Check out the audio slide show. + The 1879......

Heckling (followed by civility) was alive and well at last night's Community Board 3 meeting at Cooper Union. Wearing "Please IMPROVE the Plan!" stickers, East Village and Lower East Side residents interrupted Department of City Planning Commissioner representatives as they presented a plan for the area's first rezoning since 1961 ("Define affordable," shouted one audience member - $56,000 for a family of four, in case you're wondering, and, no, they didn't have numbers for......

DISCUSSION: A performance artist, an art critic, an art scholar, a restaurateur, and a gallery owner all walk in to a bar...Oh wait, that's not the beginning of a joke. Those creative types will all be at The New Museum tonight though for their Hot Button! discussion series. Find out their motivation behind the craft. What will win, love or money? 6:30 to 8pm // Cooper Union [7 E 7th St // $6 THEATER: Bhutan......

This week, Sarah Michelle Gellar is back for more creepy girls hiding in her hair in the new sequel, The Grudge 2. Amber Tamblyn plays her sister, who also travels to Tokyo and is also infected by the grudge inducing curse. While both American versions of the Grudge movies were directed by their Japanese creator Takashi Shimizu, it would seem that the better material would be in the originals, so we suggest renting those instead.......

-- Coming soon to Tribeca: William Tucker's "The Promise" may be the ugliest piece of public sculpture we've ever seen. -- "They Might Be Suffering From Pituitary Gigantism": a list that will amuse a very small number of TMBG fans. -- The Brooklyn Papers picked an amusing shot of Maggie Gyllenhaal to illustrate a story about celebs moving to Brooklyn. Apparently the best house she and Peter Sarsgaard could afford was a $1.75m townhouse......

President Bush ended many New Yorkers' gridlock nightmares by leaving the city yesterday, but he - and the rest of the U.S. delgation to the United Nations - missed Venezulan President Hugo Chavez's speech. And what a speech it was: Chavez called Bush "the devil," said it smelled of sulfur (since Bush had stood there), and showed said Americans should be reading Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance instead of......

It's that time of year when parents of high school seniors worry over their children just picking party schools to apply to, thanks to the listing power of the Princeton Review. The Princeton Review released its variety of lists, from Party Schools to the Most Politically Active. Where did the city's school show up? Well, Queens College was number 8 on the list for lowest alcohol and marijuana consumption, while NYU was number 1......

Mothers and fathers, don't just dream about your children being doctors (well, doctors might be passe, given malpractice coverage), lawyers or hedge fund managers: Have them set their sights on being the president of a major university. amNew York has a feature on salaries of NYC college/university presidents. The presidents are mostly charged with fund-raising, hence needing a real "performer" that gets a sweet compensation package, but the money they make can be pretty......

Walker Fee, Tape Artist Extraordinaire ...

Yesterday around 3pm we got a report that the geniuses who are knocking down 27 Cooper Square undermined the sidewalk, collapsed a scaffolding, and wounded three pedestrians. By the time we got up there around 5pm, the cops had already cleared the scene, but the sidewalk was still blocked off. If you haven't been up to the area in awhile, it's a shocking change-- they are literally tearing down the entire city block kittycorner......

The second of five Rent Guidelines Board meetings took place at Cooper Union last night. We walked over to check out the action. The RGB sets the allowable rent increases for the city's one million plus rent-stabilized apartments (that's about half of the rentable apartment inventory in NYC, according to the 2005 Housing and Vacancy Survey.) The increases each year are supposed to be based on the supply of available apartments, the cost of......

Rent stabilized tenants are bracing themselves for tonight's Rent Guidelines Board meeting where the board will most likely vote for a hike. Expect things to get incredibly noisy tonight! Actually, we imagine the basement of Cooper Union might implode from the feelings of self-pity, anger, and entitlement from both sides. The rent increases owners are asking for is 8%, because of higher gas prices and real estate taxes. And not only that, owners may also......

The Rent Guidelines Board released its price index of operating costs yesterday, and it reveals that costs for rent-stabilized building costs grew almost 8%. Which makes it likely that the RGB will approve another rent hike, as the RGB had expected a 6.7% increase. The main cause of the increase seems to be rising fuel costs, but critics say the operating costs do not take into account owners' incomes - thus it's not a true......

This week kicks off tonight with Non-fiction night at KGB Bar (85 E. 4th St.) with Harry Brunius reading from Better for All the World : The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity and Cynthia Carr reading from Our Town: Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. It starts at 7PM and is free. On Thursday night (3/23), 7PM at Barnes and Noble (Broadway at......