“Driving Jersey represents the most misunderstood and misrepresented place and people in all of America.”
This terrific series of mini-documentaries features profiles and interviews by fimmakers Steve Rogers and Ryan Batt as they travel Jersey’s highways and backroads capturing the nuance and quirky character of my home state.
Columbian artist Miler Lagos works in many mediums, including video, collage, sculpture and installation. His work, which often incorporates repurposed reading materials, is often a metaphorical take on the precarious balance between human culture and the forces of nature.
Miler’s current show (his first solo in the US) at Magnan Metz Gallery on w. 26th street in New York City runs from September 8 to October 15, 2011. The varied show centers on an installation entitled Igloo . This nine foot domed structure is built in layer of reference and history books salvaged from a defuncted US Naval base library.
If you’re like me, you love to wander through cities the lazy way : by public transit. It’s always a bit surreal to take-in the city as it swims by a bus or tram. This excellent short film of London by Moritz Oberholzer captures that wonderful mood. He shot the video with a handheld Sony camera over a thirty hour stretch from London buses.
It’s a clever marketing synch: the MTA, which has had its history of collusion with corrupt politicians and historic subway trains running old stock to promote a TV show about a crooked politician.
HBO is paying the Metropolitan Transit Agency more than $150,000, according to a spokesman, to run a Prohibition-era train along the 2/3 line in Manhattan during four September weekends. It’s a promotion for the second season of “Boardwalk Empire“, a drama set in 1920s Atlantic City.
The MTA says running the vintage train was their idea. HBO came to them looking for “something nostalgic,” said Eugene Ribeiro, the transit agency’s director of promotions. So the MTA offered one of its retired trains, an old IRT train that ran from 1917 to the 1960s. A few of the historic trains sit around in yards and at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn (where Boardwalk Empire is filmed).
The subway will run between 42nd Street and 96th streets, making express stops in between. Its interiors will be adorned with images of Nucky Thompson, the corrupt political boss at the center of Boardwalk Empire who stays in power by dispensing both fear and favors.
People paid by HBO will walk around Manhattan later this month giving out free MetroCards courtesy of Nucky.
New York artist Jay Shelowitz has embarked on an admirable campaign to help his fellow New Yorkers (and visitors too) behave civilly on the city’s subway. He’s been putting up hundreds of posters modeled after the MTA’s service changes notices. Here’s his first batch that he based entirely on surveys that he did with subway riders.
This may be the world’s smallest train…
Physicist Jason Steffen claims that he has discovered the best method for getting passengers onto an airplane twice as fast as any other way. You decide…
We all have those favorite small towns that we badger our friends to visit. You know, the out of the way villages and hamlets with great bookstores, restaurants, architecture and shops. Every year Budget Travel magazine celebrates those bright spots with the “Coolest Small Towns in America” competition. Readers nominate their favorite towns with a population of fewer than 10,000, this year nearly half a million voted, and editors choose the top ten. (full disclosure: we nominated our adopted hometown of Newtown & actively campaigned for votes)
The big winner this year is Lewisburg, West Virginia (pop. 3,830). No disrespect to Lewisburg, but we were dead chuffed by the towns that came in at numbers 6, 7 and 8. Town #6, Phoenicia, NY (pop. 309) is a slightly scruffy West Catskills mountain hamlet that’s home to our favorite pancake house in the nation, Sweet Sue’s Restaurant. And #8 this year is Cedar Key, Florida (pop. 896), which is an oldfashioned fishing village that has somehow evaded the developers onslaught.
But the big winner (from our perspective) was #7, Newtown, Pennsylvania, our little borough. Just 30 minutes from Philadelphia and 90 minutes from NYC, historic Newtown is the best of both world’s. The self-contained village of 2,384 souls ( and uncounted ghosts ) was founded by none other than William Penn himself in 1682. He even paid fair market value to the local Indians. Newtown is home to the world’s oldest continually operating movie house, a Revolutionary War battle site and one of America’s oldest public libraries. It has historic inns, colonial era homes and churchs, and blocks of classy Victorian houses. But we also have one of PA’s busiest Starbucks and two Gaps.
Leo Tolstoy saws wood and more…
Freud kills God…
Kurt Vonnegut on censorship and power…
Ray Bradbury loves libraries…
Travel Between The Pages 