The older you get, the more the icons of your childhood become real people, suffering from the inevitable passage of time; a normal thing for everyday folk, but shocking when those you worshiped and idolized as a kid get old, gain weight, or even die. This weekend, when Whitney Houston passed away all too early I was flooded with memories of dancing to her songs as a child, and even watching The Bodyguard 100 times. Today, I’m not sure I would watch anything Kevin Costner was in, but when that movie came out I was obsessed- I went and bought the CD and listened to every song on it on repeat. I have never been a religious person, but my favorite song on that album surprisingly was her version of Jesus Loves Me that she sings for a few seconds in the movie. Maybe it was her gospel roots, but she made that song sound so good. When she died, I googled “Whitney Houston, Jesus Loves Me” hoping to find the studio version, only to discover that the night before she died she unexpectedly got on stage at a pre-Grammy party and grabbed the mic and sang one verse of Jesus Loves Me. Her voice was shot, and she looked almost shy, but somehow I think that is an appropriate and beautiful last performance for a woman who is unfortunately going to be remembered as much for her astounding talent as for squandering it away through drugs and alcohol. I hope that she knew she was loved by many and she has found some peace wherever she may be now. Below is Whitney’s Jesus Loves Me if you want to hear it, as well as the video for I Wanna Dance With Somebody, one of the all-time best Whitney songs ever, although it is hard to choose. It is almost impossible not to be cheered up this video. I think the red skirt is my favorite, but the one-sleeved orange dress is equally fantastic. I also love when she pulls on the chain. Either way, she kills it and this video still makes me want to dance.

A welcome departure from the standard holiday festivities, The Grand Street Bakery marks the debut of The Cilo at The Bakery with tonight’s opening party. Situated in the back room of the bakery, which used to house a flour cilo, The Cilo expands The Bakery’s inspired mix of new and vintage clothing, homewares and trinkets by focusing on vintage electronic accessories, including vintage turntables, speakers, receivers and Danish Modern record buffets circa the ’60s. I was lucky enough to have a little sneak preview last week, and they’re truly beautiful. Among the “new” offerings are candles in the shape of Morrissey’s head, each hand carved by Derrick Cruz of Black Sheep & Prodigal Sons. Additionally, vinyls will be available from local bands, including the Wild Yaks, the Minks and Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, who will be performing tonight at the opening along with Anyways It’s Monday.

The Cilo at The Bakery is located at 602 Grand Street, Brooklyn, NYC. Its opening party is tonight, December 16, from 7pm-11pm.

The current vogue for “ruin porn” – the sensationalized and aestheticized images of dereliction and decay – was on our minds when Salome Oggenfuss and I visited the Uranian Phalanstery on a hot and humid day last September. Salome had heard from a colleague about two decrepit old interconnected brownstones on East 4th St, between Avenue C and Avenue D occupied by hoarders who gave their disposophobia artistic and spiritual pretensions. They were set to move at the end of the month and we decided to plan a visit before they vacated the premises. We knew a bit about the Uranian Phalanstery from an online search and would soon find out more from our guide, Medhi Matin, who was living in a room on the top floor. In 1959, artist couple Richard Oviet Tyler and Dorothea Baer founded the Phalanstery in New York City while living in a still-active synagogue serving Ukrainian immigrants. When the synagogue closed in 1974 the building became the headquarters of the Uranian Phalanstery. Designed as an “anarchist utopia commune for practitioners of art and cosmology,” the name comes from the philosophy of the visionary Charles Fourier, who in the beginning of the 19th century designed the Phalanstère: a sprawling structure that would hold his own imagined utopian community. Soon the couple would buy the building next door and create the First Gnostic Lyceum of New York.

Just around the corner from the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Phalanstery and Lyceum were very active until Richard succumbed to face-cancer in 1983. During this period they hosted a Tibetan Burial Society and spiritual tattoo studio (at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York), celebrations of various solstices and equinoxes with music and dance, and a printing press for artist publications and Gnostic pamphlets – all the while envisioning the space itself as a constantly evolving artwork. From the outside there was nothing extraordinary about the Phalanstery, which looked like a normal, if shabby, building in Alphabet City. After answering the door Matin, 32, introduced us to the place and their dedication to individual and communal expression and creativity. At the time of our visit, only he and Dorothea were living there. It was only three weeks before they had to move out, after selling the buildings for over $3 million to partially pay a tax lien and relocating uptown to Hamilton Heights.

After our quick chat Matin handed us a pair of flashlights and graciously offered to let us wander around for a bit. There were no overhead lights and the electricity came from extensions chords anchored in the building next door. The piles of folk art, musical instruments, stuffed animals, tchotchkes, etc., make it tempting to think of the Tylers as so-called outsider artists, but the fact that Richard and Dorothea had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and that the former had sold works to the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller collection and the Smithsonian bellies that somewhat condescending label.

We followed Matin down a dark creaking staircase into Richard’s basement studio. Entering the room, the first thing he pointed out was the bed in the corner where Tyler died. Matin said he’d show us Richard’s series of self-portraits detailing his facial deterioration but he never mentioned it again and it felt too macabre to remind him. The studio perfectly provided the context for Richard’s work, both temporally and thematically. My flashlight first fell upon newspaper clippings of mug shots from the Chinatown gang the Ghost Shadows, prominent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The roof of the studio was completely covered with A4 posters, Tibetian prayer flags and prints reminiscent of William Blake. Chapbooks from the Uranian Press sat on a pushcart, seemingly ready to be hauled to the market. Bookshelves lined the walls crammed with artist books, books on cosmology and assorted esoterica. FBI most wanted posters for the likes of Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground and Puerto Rican separatist William Guillermo Morales, and other members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberaction Nacional, sat besides a hand-written quote about beautiful destruction from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Medhi left us alone to explore and I nearly stepped in cat vomit as I looked up at a print of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son. On one table there is a series of photos of Richard in the Pacific Front in World War II. Despite the mélange of objects and images the aesthetic felt oddly coherent.

The rest of the house, starting in the Lyceum on the ground floor of the next building that held their collection of rare musical instruments from around the world and an assortment of folk art, did not feel as unified in its aesthetic as Richard’s studio. Nothing really felt out of place in the rest of the house: not the flat-screen in the temple room, not Matin’s laptop sitting on a desk in his living quarters, not an icon of Jesus with four arms holding a hammer and sickle, nor the working kitchen.

Matin lived in a room on the third floor of the Lyceum. On the second floor landing, the walls covered by a mural, we passed the door to Dorothea’s room. It was locked and off limits during our tour. We continued up the stairs to Matin’s room. At first, walking in felt like walking into a normal East Village apartment. There was a mattress on the floor, a shelf with clothes and books, and the afternoon sun and the cross breeze made the room feel light and airy. Adjacent to his room, however, was the space that felt the most remarkable in the entire house. There was nothing in the room but an old mattress, covered with dust and rubble, sitting on a rusty iron frame. The roof is half caved in, the light fixture hanging on by a bit of wiring. Two dead monarch butterflies sat on the windowsill, the remnants of a performance. I immediately thought of one of Dorothea’s works we saw in the basement studio: the skeletons of small animals – a bird and some kind of rodent – that had simply been left to decompose. Perhaps counter-intuitively, despite being devoid of the clutter of accumulated objects, the room somehow felt like the most personal and private space in the house. It was where, via the display of the decay of the architecture and the decay of bodies, the weight of the passage of time itself bore down upon us.

Decay is intertwined with the experience of time and the philosopher Dylan Trigg claims that the philosophical value of decay is its resistance to representation and stasis. Community groups failed in getting the city to grant landmark status to this pair of brownstones to prevent their redevelopment, claiming that the buildings were built around 1840 and have been virtually unchanged since – they hadn’t even been rewired since the beginning of the 20th century. While it’s difficult not to feel as though the neighborhood lost something when the Phalanstery moved uptown, there is a sense that it is perhaps not a bad thing that it moved before becoming monumentalized as a sort of time capsule from a time where artists could actually afford two buildings in the East Village to pursue their esoteric creative goals individually and communally, as a subsequent stop for tourists visiting the nearby Tenement Museum.

Conceiving of this piece as another obituary resulting from of the wave of gentrification that has now subsumed all of Alphabet City also seems both obvious and beside the point when considering the Phalanstery. It was a time capsule, but not one that has been hermetically sealed. Richard’s studio had not been preserved so much as it was left alone. Decay also powerfully evokes the death and nothingness that awaits us all. Unlike visions of death that focus on continuity and the life that emerges in and from death – pullulating, swarming, breeding – there was a musty stillness to the Uranian Phalanstery. I asked Matin how they plan to recreate this milieu in their new building uptown. “Recreate isn’t really the right word,” he answers. “More like reassemble.” What one imagines would be impossible to transpose is the palpable sense of rot that one felt walking into the Uranian Phalanstery.

We left Matin and went out into the ridiculously humid afternoon, our clothing smelling of a combination of mildew and cat piss. Unlike the ruins in places laid waste to by deindustrialization like Detroit, which bears witness to a society squandering its resources, there is nothing tragic about the fate of the Phalanstery. Not coupled to dereliction, the structure had been allowed to decay while it was inhabited and culturally active. The Phalanstery was never intended to remain cemented in the riverbed against the flow of history or to serve as a bulwark against complete and total gentrification. For better or for worse, Alphabet City has changed drastically since Richard and Dorothea founded the Phalanstery. The Phalanstery changed as well, although at a considerably slower pace. Walking through the different levels of the house, one was exposed to not only the history of the neighborhood, but a more geological, natural history – to living ruins.

All photos by Salome Oggenfuss

When I was in grade school, New York City was heralded as the world’s “melting pot,” an anthropomorphic melding of cultures. Today, word is that teachers have moved onto a “salad” analogy, arguing that while the various human ingredients harmoniously mix and mingle, they retain their separate identities. Whichever school you subscribe to, one of the most esteemed attributes of our city is its acceptance of all types.

Within New York, each of these distinct individuals carves out his or her niche, the place that becomes “home.” For native New Yorkers, home is usually the vicinity around which they grew up. For transplants, it’s more often than not the neighborhood of their first apartment. This is part of what makes the city endlessly fascinating: it is a different place for everyone. There are the occasional shared experiences, but for the most part your New York is as unique as your fingerprint.

New York:The Pegleg, the most recent installment in the WhaiWhai guidebook series, highlights this diversity, presenting an entertaining and educational tool that crosses eras, classes and ethnicities to offer a unique look at the iconoclasts, visionaries and dreamers who created and continue to inhabit New York.

The term “whaiwhai” comes from a Maori word meaning “to search for,” and consequently the guidebook is structured around the search for “the pegleg,” a particularly powerful prosthesis that first arrived in New York in 1647 on the leg of Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant (true story). After Governor Stuyvesant’s death, the wooden leg, which was wrapped in bands of supposedly supernatural silver, was hidden in the family crypt in the East Village, where the governor was actually buried. The WhaiWhai story goes that before the crypt was permanently sealed, the leg vanished and has been missing since. The fictional narrator of The Pegleg, Shlep Wallace, is a longtime prop specialist who recently found the notebook of deceased scientist Nikola Tesla. Inside the notebook are clues speaking to the pegleg’s powers. Therefore, Shlep is calling upon the reader (you) to help recover the absconded appendage.

A text message exchange later (each book contains a unique code ) and you are on your way to exploring corners of New York that even the most seasoned city-goer has overlooked, which is why this guidebook is as entertaining for residents as it is for visitors. Each of the obscure sites featured contains a historical anecdote that exemplifies the eccentric personalities—past and present—who make up our eclectic “salad.”

My first stop was the spot where hotelier David Weissberg jumped to his death in 2002. Today it’s the Gramercy Park Hotel, a place I last visited for a luxury sunglasses launch. Next, I was led to 49 Irving Place, the former residence of interior design maven and style trailblazer Elsie De Wolfe and her partner Elisabeth “Bessy” Marbury, who entranced early 20th-century Manhattan society with their raucous parties. At each location you search for the answer to the riddle in the given story. Once found, you send it via text message and receive the code—which corresponds to the book’s tri-fold pages—to the next site. The ultimate goal, of course, is to find the elusive pegleg. And you can play as many times as you like; each adventure is different than the last.

Shlep may be the imaginary storyteller, but the real raconteur behind The Pegleg is Timothy Speed Levitch (who goes by Speed) a longtime New Yorker, writer, tour guide and actor whose descendants arrived via Ellis Island. Here, he reveals a bit about the creation of The Pegleg and offers an insight into his New York.

Erin Dixon: Tell us a bit about your background—how did you come to learn so much about New York?

Speed Levitch: I’m still learning about New York, of course. It’s an endless field of study. I started in the Bronx, lived in Riverdale and attended Horace Mann High School, but I barely knew my way around Manhattan until I went to NYU for college. I’m a flaneur and I’ve been appreciating the scenery and the stories of the city my whole life.

Erin: What was something you learned about New York during your research that surprised you?

Speed: That the Mercury Theater Company of players and their director/star Orson Welles all thought that the script for “War of The Worlds” was stupid, and right before they went on air Orson Welles apologized to his actors for burdening them with such dull, insipid material. Apparently, the actors were making fun of the script right up until air. Even as they were performing it live (as half of New Jersey freaked out), they were locked away in a little studio room in Midtown—just having fun with what they assumed was campy, overly sentimentalized material.

Erin: How did you decide which stories to incorporate?

Speed: In school, I studied playwriting and I was drawn to tour guiding due to the theatricality of the job—the performance aspect. When I’m looking at the history of the city, choosing stories about the city, I’m looking for a good play script I can perform. Mostly, I prefer comedy. I like funny stories most of all. Of course, a good play needs stories that are filled with passion, epiphany, surprise and dynamic human characters, which live through anecdotes we can all identify with and learn from. Hopefully, at the end of the stories there’s some kind of catharsis or healing for the reader.

Erin: Which is your favorite story or character in The Pegleg?

Speed: I’m a little bit fickle… The story I would choose for my favorite would be different depending on my mood and the time of day, etc. But I can answer for tonight. Tonight, my favorite story is “Flight of the Missouri Rockets.” It’s the story about how the Rockettes were invented and about the rite of passage that Radio City Music Hall had to go through in order to fully realize its potential as a music hall. Roxy, the visionary behind Radio City, is an amazing character and he stars in this beautiful tale about self-realization, the creative spirit and invention. (It’s also my favorite story because it features the Missouri Rockets, the dance troupe of 64 gorgeous ladies out of St. Louis.)

Erin: How did you come up with the character Shlep Wallace? Was he based on anyone you know?

Speed: Yes, Shlep is certainly an amalgam of several wise old men I’ve listened carefully to over the years, but, of course, Shlep is also his own man. I could hear his unique, rasping voice in my mind’s ear as I wrote the stories. While writing the stories, I often felt as if Shlep were giving me dictation.

Erin: Does the pegleg really exist, hidden somewhere in NY? Will the reader ever arrive at the true end?

Speed: I wouldn’t want to say for sure. I want to preserve the mystery and the fun of the game. Let me just say this: The stakes couldn’t be more raised! The pegleg really did exist. What really happened to it? Impossible to say for sure. It’s very possible that it’s buried with Stuyvesant’s body in his crypt underneath St. Mark’s Church. There are all sorts of historic images and artistic renditions of Peter Stuyvesant’s pegleg. Many of his contemporaries called it “silver leg” because it was a fancy pegleg that had silver bands. There is a Stuyvesant family crypt where his corpse was put, apparently with both his real and fake leg, but the family crypt wasn’t sealed until the last Stuyvesant went in there in the 1950s.

Erin: What is your favorite neighborhood in Manhattan?

Speed: Lately, my favorite neighborhood is the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mainly, I think, just because it is such a mad mix of events. Another good name for that hood would be “unlikely.” It is a zany collection of events that birthed that current, unique place. It’s also a great place for nosh—the small, delicious immigrant foods you can enjoy as you walk. New York’s specialty is great food that moves with you.

Erin: If there is one place in Manhattan that everyone should see, what is it?

Speed: Rush hour. I enjoy viewing rush hour in and around Grand Central, of course. Penn Station is also excellent. Downtown, in general is good and the Staten Island Ferry Terminal…along the bridges, especially the Brooklyn Bridge. Really, I think the one landmark of New York that everyone should see is some perch where they can view and be properly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the city mobilizing during the two rush hours, daily. Of course, it’s always great people watching, too.

Erin: What makes Manhattan unique from other cities?

Speed: I tend to think that all cities and places are teachers. There’s something to learn from all real estate, basically. I’m writing a piece right now about Lawrence, Kansas and although Lawrence and its stories have different lessons to teach and certainly create a different tone and atmosphere than New York does with its stories, I’m still certian that both cities—the sixth largest city of the state of Kansas and New York—are equally themselves, equally unique. I think of them both as two great gurus, only very different gurus, who advise me on very different subjects.

R.E.M. announced late yesterday that it is officially splitting up after a three-decade run as one the seminal bands in modern American music. The news of this break is sure to throw their fans into an intense memory whirlpool. I guarantee iTunes is experiencing a heavy influx of shoppers while recollections of R.E.M.’s vast oeuvre are strong today.

The official statement, released via the band’s site, reads: “”To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.”

As a massive fan, a million thoughts rush to the surface. I’ll share some of them with you (please feel free to comment with your own experiences):

- The first time I saw the Losing My Religion video…
- The collaborations: Musical – Patti Smith, Kate Pierson (of the B-52s), KRS-One, Thurston Moore and Q-Tip, among many others; and artistically: Albert Maysles, James Franco, Sophie Calle and Sam Taylor Wood – the list goes on and on.
- Playing out our own version of Nightswimming at summer camp in 1993.
- Finally relating to my parents on a current, chart-topping band.
- So much time spent with the liner notes to every single album. Remember liner notes? Remember the way a cassette smelled when you ripped the cellophane off?
- The profound impact on and support given by Stipe to Kurt Cobain.
- Memorizing the lyrics to You Are The Everything, which I still remember:
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing
I’m very scared for this world
I’m very scared for me
Eviscerate your memory
Here’s a scene
You’re in the back seat laying down
The windows wrap around to the sound
of the travel and the engine
All you hear is time stand still in travel
and feel such peace and absolute stillness
still that doesn’t end
But slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you’ve ever seen
And they’re there for you
For you alone you are the everything”

Out on newsstands this week is the new issue of Dossier, which includes an interview I did with Stipe. Our conversation focused primarily on his artwork. Below are a selection of images Stipe chose to accompany the piece.

Corner shot from Andrea Rosen bathroom, NYC

Hermetic JFK, sculpture by Michael Stipe

Pyrite image, faxed and shittily scanned

From Stipe’s Corner series

The University of California, Berkeley’s School of Journalism is currently working on a project to redesign the nutrition facts food label affixed to prepackaged foods across the country. The competition is informal, but the visual concepts presented may make their way into the US Food and Drug Administration’s current revamping of the label and its presentation of information.

What’s so intriguing about these submissions is the way in which it asks the viewer (who is also the consumer) to rethink the way they see and think about a label that they view on a daily basis. What do we actually look for when we look at a nutrition facts label? What pops out at us? How does changing our perspective literally change the way we look at the food we’re contemplating purchasing or eating? How does viewing the nutrition label as a visual and educational object change our view of it?

Renee Walker’s winning entry, below, relies on colored boxes to illustrate the composition of ingredients in a given food item. How would seeing the visual breakdown of, say, a Twix bar change ideas about consumption? Judge Michael Pollan remarked, “I wonder how her design would work with more complicated products, like Lucky Charms, say, or a PowerBar. Even so, it’s a step in the right direction. What I’d like to see next is some sort of color coding for the food groups and some attempt to show the degree of processing of various foods. Eating doesn’t have to be complicated; figuring out what’s in your food shouldn’t be either.”

The other labels are on display on UC Berkeley’s Rethink the Food Label website, and on the NYTimes Well blog.

Top image by Dylan Brown, bottom image by Renee Walker.

See goalkeeper Hope Solo—pictured above in a recent Nike campaign shot by Annie Leibovitz—and the rest of the US National team compete against Japan in the FIFA Women’s World Cup Final today at 2:45 EST on ESPN.

One of the best reasons to visit Finland’s capital, Helsinki, in August is the Flow Festival. The annual three-day music festival is held in a very beautiful industrial area next to the city center, by the sea. And every year it features an inspired line up, which for 2011 includes artists such as Kanye West, Twin Shadow, Ariel Pink, Mogwai and others, in addition to—of course—some of the best Finnish musicians.

Above photo by Alex Marillat

Giardini della Biennale. All images by Silvia Bergomi.

This year the theme of La Biennale di Venezia is “Illuminazioni,” which lends an even-more-magical-than-usual atmosphere to a seminal exhibition and city already saturated with charm and decaying elegance. Surpass the masses and get to the heart of the matter: the creativity with these notes from a native Italian.

Key Vocabulary:
vaporetto = water bus
calle = street
campo = plaza
cicchetto = drink

Tips:
Avoid restaurants with photographic menus.
Sample baccalà alla veneziana.
Bring sunscreen and band-aids for blisters.
(Everybody is looking for them, so the pharmacy will likely be out.)

Top Pavillion Picks:
UK, Sweden, Japan, Korea and France
Feel free to skip the Italian Pavillion; there are many other, more inspiring things to see.
But don’t miss the Padiglione Centrale inside Giardini della Biennale or Corderie/Artiglierie.

Must-See Artists:
Maurizio Cattelan & Monica Bonvicini for (La Rappresentanza Italiana)
Martin Creed (of course)
Urs Fischer (of course, too)
Nathaniel Mellors (UK)
Hajnal Németh (Hungary)
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (USA)
Gerard Byrne (Ireland)
Lee Yong Baek (Korea)
Klara Lidén (Sweden)
Fia Backstrom (Sweden)
Markus Schinwald (Austria)
Rashid Johnson (USA)
Reynier Leyva (Cuba)

Facade of the German Pavillion

Click “Read More” for additional images.

View from a vaporetto

Casa Medici, Cannaregio

Installation by Francisco Bassim, Clemencia Labin, Yoshi at the Venezuelan Pavillon

American Airlines by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla at the American Pavillon

The Brazilian Pavillion

Crash by Hajnal Németh at the Hungarian Pavillion

The Love is Gone but the Scar will Heal by Lee Yongbeak at the Korean Pavillion

Portrait by Markus Schinwald at the Austrian Pavillion

Installation by Rashid Johnson at the Artiglierie

Light and Darkness of Symbols by Todosijevic Dragoljub Raša at the Serbian Pavillion

Sculpture by Urs Fischer at the Artiglierie

Canal Grande

I’ve watched Vice TV a few times and I am always impressed by the topics taken on by a magazine made famous for Dos and Don’ts. Right now they have an amazing video up about the Holy Thug Saints of Caracas, Venezuela. In a city where more than 100 murders are logged each weekend (14,000 were murdered last year alone) people flock in droves to the cemetery to pray for revenge, protection, freedom of a loved one from jail and other daily occurrences in such an extremely violent place. Predominately Catholic, but with a large dose of Spiritism or Santeria, people give offerings and pray to Santos Malandros (Holy Thugs) instead of worshiping traditional Catholic saints. The thugs are all once real-life gangsters immortalized in statue form wearing sideways baseball caps, sporting guns, scars and gold chains. The female saints rock sports bras, doorknockers and bandanas. They all look super familiar to the line of Homie Dolls that were popular in the late 90′s sold in gumball machines. The icons have holes built into their mouths so you can insert an offering of a cigarette or a joint to them. It is understandable that these figures are more identifiable to someone afraid of being shot every day than say, a white woman in flowy robes. I was a little upset when the narrator pokes fun at the dolls and the woman in the Santeria store, but I think it is probably hard to be too serious with the Vice audience especially when covering such heavy topics. Either way, I loved this video and thought it was an interesting look into how religions are formed when people find nothing to identify with that already exists. This practice of Thug worship, called Corte Malandra has already spread to Cuba and Spain and is now growing strong in many other Spanish speaking countries. It’s not so crazy if you think that not that long ago someone started Mormonism, too. Video below.