Results tagged “nyc”

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Nerdy white guys still dominate sketch comedy and SketchFest. Debate all you want whether women’s under-representation comes from a lack of funny or surplus of sensibility, we were relieved Saturday to see groups looking more like, and inspired by, real life.

While we were chompin' at the bit for the return of Project Runway following a holiday hiatus, the casting for Bravo's next attempt at reality success had us wishing some more episodes of The Office were ready to go.

• SFist saw Christmas Day turn tragic after a Siberian tiger escaped from her pen at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and mauling two others.
• Phillyist counted down the top ten items on Philadelphia's New Year's wish list.
• Gothamist looked at the wooden bikes being offered for NYC's first bike share program on Governors Island.

So many movies, so little time. How true. Unless you're a professional cinephile, there's no hope of seeing even a fraction of what looks interesting in any given year. We actually tallied up the numbers and between theatrical releases, film festival screenings, and DVDs we've seen 175 movies this year — barely any at all. And with the industry's practice of backloading releases, a veritable midyear drought suddenly giving way to an avalanche of multiple releases at year's end, it's harder than ever to keep up.

It may be too cold for 70's gym shorts (a la the Pitchfork Music Festival), but you can bet that tonight's Vampire Weekend show at Schubas will double as a winter fashion show/breeding ground for Chicago's hipsterati. The NYC quartet's kinda creepy, kinda awesome take on indie rock "world music" has earned them plenty of blog love, packed houses, and a contract for their first full length release with powerhouse XL Recordings.

The Holiday season is in full swing in NYC, with holiday lights in Brooklyn, a giant snow globe in Bryan Park and Chanukah specials for ham. One citizen decided to go vigilante on annoying car alarms, a murder suspect used a fake Asian accent on the stand and a video of a man being beaten up by teenage girls on a subway shocked the city. And we interviewed soon-to-be-leaving-Gawker editor Choire Sicha, who said,...

We've already tripped all over ourselves about how terrific Great Northern is. In fact, here's a sampling of our past praise:

Gothamist learned about the craziest urban nightmare come true: A huge python found in the bathroom pipes. It was also a nightmare for some Yankees fans, as manger Joe Torre declined to come back and manage the Bronx Bombers. At least the city's attempt to give some direction to subway riders was interesting, pranksters went shirtless at the Fifth Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch and the I Heart Brooklyn Girls calendars came out. And just...

Starting Saturday, the MCA is free for all for 40 days to celebrate 40 years of bringing fun, engaging, and occasionally frustrating contemporary art to Chicago. Through November 14, your visit involves nothing more frustrating than remembering where you put your coat check tag and fighting massive crowds to see your favorite Warhol and Murakami. It’s a gift to Chicago to be sure, but also a chance to reflect on four decades of freaky sculpture...

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom...

Chicagoist is gearing up for this weekend's annual Air & Water Show along the lakefront. In what's becoming an annual tradition around there, staff member Todd McClamroch even got to fly with one of the participants. Chicagoist's decidedly opinionated readership was also appalled that one of their staffers found a popular local brewpub to be a great place to bring a kid. They also think that an unlikely activist for immigration rights should just take...

While SFist cringed at the fatal dose of crime littering the Bay Area, it found solace in Hillary Clinton's San Francisco campaign headquarters opening, which featured loads of exposed mammary glands. In other news, SF Taxi Commission ruled that Satan's cab must keep its (in)famous medallion number, 666; and in an un-fashion-forward frenzy, San Francisco Fashion Week (chortle) bars bloggers from covering and getting smashed at their shows and parties, respectively. Also, they found a...

Winston’s Market on Southport suffers from multiple personalities. But unlike Sybil, it’s a good thing. Opened last May, this former shoe boutique now houses a deli, a self-service restaurant, a beer and wine store, and a gourmet prepared-foods shop. Sound like they have too much on their plate? Not when we stopped by and noticed that the friendly staff had plenty of time to answer our questions, take our order (they didn’t even flinch when we asked for our bread to be toasted on the already prepared sandwich), quickly wiped down tables and chairs (why do other places always forget this?), prepared orders to go, and hand-delivered them to customers checking to make sure they had pronounced their names correctly, and waved at babies. Whew!

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the...

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they...

A.O Scott’s review of the new Michael Moore movie begins with a very astute observation; namely, that whenever Moore’s name is brought up it is inevitably attached to adjectives such as “polarizing,” “controversial,” “provocative,” and “muck-raking.” And that it is the media itself which perpetuates the use of these adjectives. Would one describe Steven Spielberg as “polarizing?” Spielberg has two films in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time and no one describes him that way. Yet (among documentaries) Moore has two films in the top five. How “controversial” can a filmmaker be and yet sell so many tickets? We just think he’s a filmmaker possessing a keen instinct for issues that get people riled up, which is a good thing.

What do The Gap, American Airlines, the main titles for Little Miss Sunshine and Royal Bank of Scotland have in common? They all use the same typeface: Helvetica. Born in 1957 its clean, "neutral" look was revolutionary. 50 years later, and it's omnipresent. If you keep your eyes peeled you'll see it everywhere around you, on practically every city street, in every newspaper and magazine and, most of all, in advertising. Why? As Finlo...

LAist is experimenting with blogging dates from J-Date, but finds the best men are found offline. Some date vicariously online and that is one reason why porn is big -- really freaking big -- so they ask if they should cover XXX since the heart of it lays in the city's San Fernando Valley. A writer grapples with her food porn photography obsession, another gets censored on Flickr, one gets scooped by the LA...

Chicago native Jason Kanakis is one of those rare dudes who can honestly call himself a "career musician." He's has toured the world playing with the likes of KT Tunstall, Butch Walker, Rachael Yamagata, Aqualung, and an impressive heap of others. Now based in Los Angeles, Jason has an interesting perspective on how the Chicago music scene shapes up in comparison to the rest of the country, not to mention some pretty weird stories about life on the road. Fresh off a tour with Brett Dennen, Chicagoist caught up with Jason for a quick chat about touring, Chicago's music community, and Singapore's transvestite prostitutes.

Download the original attachment We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment...

It seems like, all across the network, folks were up to no good. Maybe it was all the green beer from last weekend... Gothamist spent the week writing about New Yorkers behaving badly: at the post office, at the Garden, and at the fertility clinic. Calvin Klein may not be misbehaving, but he's just a little dirty, and in a completely different way than some NYC kitchens. SFist had its share of misbehave-rs, too, like...

Parents, get ready for another summer of “Can We? Can We? Can We?? Can We?????” The Empire of the Mouse is bringing the first extended run of High School Musical, stage version, to the LaSalle Bank Theater. The runaway sensation of stage and screen lets elementary and middle school kids—and their parents—live vicariously through its characters, which in turn are living vicariously through the drama department.

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to...

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,...

Anheuser-Busch is taking heat for an ad they ran during Super Bowl XLI. For laughs, the 30-second spot glorifies interracial and intergenerational violence, not to mention violence against cute women, Asian American food service workers, and pretty much everyone. But the real issue is that ad agency DDB Chicago may have stolen the idea from NYC sketch comedy troupe Whitest Kids U’Know, who smack each other around in their video The New Thing. The Bud...

First there was "Trading Spaces." Then there was "Trading Spouses." Now, for that glorious indignity known as Sweeps Month, ABC has bestowed upon us Fan February. Here's the haps: Three lucky daytime TV fans get to trade jobs for a day with an actor from their favorite soap opera. S/He gets to jet out to New York City to hang with daytime's acting elite; the actor trundles off to BFE, Flyover Country. If Range Bloodstone ever wanted to find out what it's like to wash down hippos or flip burgers (like he doesn't know what that's like, he's an actor, for crying out loud), well, here's his chance as well. This year, one of the chosen fans happens to be from DeKalb, which was enough to get "All My Children"'s Jeff Branson into ABC's studios yesterday, and to get Chicagoist to cover it.

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing. Austinist said goodbye to their co-editor (sell-out) and played rumor monger on the SXSW lineup. And when dozens of dead birds littered downtown Austin, it's...