Thursday, September 29, 2011

Mayonnaise Store in Brooklyn

4th NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Grub Street

Come November, [Sam] Mason and business partner Elizabeth Valleau will open possibly the world's first shop dedicated entirely to high-end mayo, on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. 

Empire Mayonnaise will be more of a lab than a store, Valleau tells Grub. Though they will sell products and hold events, the storefront is only a small portion of the shop — the rest is a giant refrigerator and testing lab. Empire will initially feature around 40 flavors, with Mason devising a new one each week; coffee, smoked paprika, foie gras, and mushroom are already on the menu.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

JR MURAL's In SoHo On Grand Street + Wooster Street

3rd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Freshness Mag

JR‘s newest mural on the Houston Street (and Bowery) wall, the 2011 TED Prize winner and his band of associates kept busy with 2 additional murals. On the juncture of Grand and Wooster, the murals are on 2 walls diagonally across from one another, near vicinities of where Jeffery Deitch’s two Deitch Projects galleries used to be. Both are tributes from ’s Native American Standing Rock Nation series.


Tuesday, September 27, 2011

THE POSTMORTAL

3rd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Amazon 

Plot Summary: Imagine a near future where a cure for aging is discovered and-after much political and moral debate-made available to people worldwide. Immortality, however, comes with its own unique problems-including evil green people, government euthanasia programs, a disturbing new religious cult, and other horrors. Witty, eerie, and full of humanity, The Postmortal is an unforgettable thriller that envisions a pre-apocalyptic world so real that it is completely terrifying.

"Drew Magary's haunting first novel imagines a postmodern dystopia that would seem far-fetched if it didn't seem so possible. The Postmortal will make you regret ever wondering, even secretly, what it would be like to live forever." -Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic


ESPO (Steve Powers) Installation in Downtown Brooklyn

3rd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

Monday, September 26, 2011

MTA's WEEKENDER Map by Massimo Vignelli

2nd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From New York Times

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil on Friday an online-only map that portrays the subway as it actually appears on the next tangled, jumbled weekend. And in a retro twist, the map is modeled on the 1970s-era guide by Massimo Vignelli, a much-missed city icon that now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.

The stylish digital map will be customized each weekend to reflect the myriad service changes that regularly bedevil straphangers on Saturdays and Sundays. Currently, rerouted lines and shut stations are noted only in stiffly written prose that sometimes compounds riders’ confusion.

The interactive map is searchable by line, borough and station, and it flags trouble spots with blinking lights. Click, and the site will reveal a rundown of what woe awaits, whether a closed platform or an unexpected station stop.

The Weekender, making its debut on Friday, is based on the 1972 subway map designed by Massimo Vignelli. Blinking lights flag trouble spots, and riders can search by line, borough or station.

JOAN BAEZ IS ALIVE by Marc Hundley

2nd  NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Team Gal

Marc Hundley’s fabricated advertisements take the forms of posters, postcards, flags, and t-shirts that promote poetic moments from a partly imagined past. For this exhibition, Hundley presents a dozen new posters with texts and images culled from ’60s and ’70s era music, fine art, film and literature. These sentimental snapshots provide a mode for Hundley to both catalogue and evaluate personal experiences in retrospect. A folded piece of paper, a handwritten note, a found photograph, a psychedelic album cover, or a poignant lyric — each marks particular events and impressions in a contemplative diary of melodic moments.

Entitled Joan Baez is Alive is a solo presentation by New York based artist Marc Hundley. The exhibition will run from September 15th through October 29th, 2011. Team is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will house the one-person exhibition Sculptures: 1973-74 by Vlassis Caniaris.

Northeast Farmers Blame Hufficane IRENE for Pumpkin Shortage

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From USA Today

Hurricane Irene destroyed hundreds of pumpkin patches across the region, farmers say.

Wholesale prices have doubled in some places as farmers nurse their surviving pumpkin plants toward a late harvest. Some farmers are trying to buy pumpkins from other regions to cover orders.

"I think there's going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year," said Darcy Pray, owner of Pray's Family Farms in Keeseville, in upstate New York. "I've tried buying from people down in the Pennsylvania area, I've tried locally here and I've tried reaching across the border to some farmers over in the Quebec area. There's just none around."

Hurricane Irene raked the Northeast in late August, bringing torrents of rain that overflowed rivers and flooded fields along the East Coast and into southern Canada. Pray saw his entire crop, about 15,000 to 20,000 pumpkins, washed into Lake Champlain.

Pro-Israel Politicians Talked Out of Cutting Aid to Palestinian Authority by Netanyahu

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix 

When the Obama administration wanted to be certain that Congress would not block $50 million in new aid to the Palestinian Authority last month, it turned to a singularly influential lobbyist: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

At the request of the American Embassy and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Netanyahu urged dozens of members of Congress visiting Israel last month not to object to the aid, according to Congressional and diplomatic officials. Mr. Netanyahu’s intervention with Congress underscored an extraordinary intersection of American diplomacy and domestic politics, the result of an ever-tightening relationship between the Israeli government and the Republican Party that now controls the House.

Bloomberg's Fondness for Leopard-Print

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

(Photo courtesy of Reuters)

The Approval Matrix: Week of October 3, 2011


Thursday, September 22, 2011

CONTAGION by by Steven Soderbergh

4th NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

THE 2011 NIKE MAG BACK TO THE FUTURE Sneakers

4th NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

THE 2011 NIKE MAG

You are looking at the rarest of Nike Footwear. For 22 years they have existed only in the year 2015 on Marty McFly’s feet. Today they are finally a reality. Famed Nike designer Tinker Hatfield and footwear innovator Tiffany Beers have returned to recreate the footwear legend. Based on an original movie prop used in Back to the Future Part II, the 2011 Nike MAG shoes have been entirely rebuilt and perfected. They feature an electroluminescent outsole, space-age materials and a rechargeable internal battery good for 3,000 hours. And while they are not recommended for playing sports, these highly limited shoes will very likely command attention wherever they are worn.


Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Lil Wayne: “Republicans Are Never Going To Like Us”

3rd  NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From News One by The Grio

Rapper Lil Wayne recently shared his thoughts about the Republican debate held on Monday night in an interview with VIBE magazine. The Rapper spoke about health care, and how race plays in President Obama’s presidency.


DC Comics Relaunch of ANIMAL MAN


3rd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Amazon 

Product Description - From Grant Morrison, creator of The Invisibles and writer of New X-Men and JLA, comes a classic tale of a man whose struggle to save human lives becomes something more...Buddy Baker is Animal Man, able to take on the characteristics of any creature he touches. After some time away from high-profile heroics, he decides to get back into costume - much to the chagrin of his wife and son - and is soon involved in a series of dangerous and exciting adventures. But Buddy has some decisions to make, and some shocks to come; because for the first time, he's listening to the animals. And he doesn't like what he's hearing...

DC Comics relaunched Animal Man with issue #1 in September 2011 with writer Jeff Lemire and artist Travel Foreman.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

MISSONI For Target

2nd  NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From ABC News
Target’s collection of the Italian company Missoni, founded in 1953, is “a hit” according to a Target spokeswoman.

Target calls the launch of its designer Missoni collection a success after shoppers flocked to store for the launch on Tuesday, even reportedly crashing the retailer’s website. Many shoppers found only leftovers at stores that were picked apart before the day ended.

Spike Lee's STATE FARM 9/11 Commercial

2nd  NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

Monday, September 19, 2011

The Sleazy Origin of the Term "Student-Athlete"

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From The Atlantic by Taylor Branch

The Myth of the “Student-Athlete”

Today, much of the NCAA’s moral authority—indeed much of the justification for its existence—is vested in its claim to protect what it calls the “student-athlete.” The term is meant to conjure the nobility of amateurism, and the precedence of scholarship over athletic endeavor. But the origins of the “student-athlete” lie not in a disinterested ideal but in a sophistic formulation designed, as the sports economist Andrew Zimbalist has written, to help the NCAA in its “fight against workmen’s compensation insurance claims for injured football players.”

“We crafted the term student-athlete,” Walter Byers himself wrote, “and soon it was embedded in all NCAA rules and interpretations.” The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a “work-related” accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was “not in the football business.”

The term student-athlete was deliberately ambiguous. College players were not students at play (which might understate their athletic obligations), nor were they just athletes in college (which might imply they were professionals). That they were high-performance athletes meant they could be forgiven for not meeting the academic standards of their peers; that they were students meant they did not have to be compensated, ever, for anything more than the cost of their studies. Student-athlete became the NCAA’s signature term, repeated constantly in and out of courtrooms.

Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases. On the afternoon of October 26, 1974, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were playing the Alabama Crimson Tide in Birmingham, Alabama. Kent Waldrep, a TCU running back, carried the ball on a “Red Right 28” sweep toward the Crimson Tide’s sideline, where he was met by a swarm of tacklers. When Waldrep regained consciousness, Bear Bryant, the storied Crimson Tide coach, was standing over his hospital bed. “It was like talking to God, if you’re a young football player,” Waldrep recalled.

The rest of the article can be read here.

Opera Star Silvatore Licitra Dies in Scooter Accident

From The New York Times by ZACHARY WOOLFE

Salvatore Licitra, a tenor with a ringing, powerful voice who rode a sensational surprise Metropolitan Opera debut to dozens of performances with the company, died on Monday in Catania, Sicily, nine days after being severely injured in a motor-scooter accident. He was 43. His death was reported on his Web site, salvatorelicitra.com.

News reports said that Mr. Licitra lost control of his scooter after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage on the evening of Aug. 27 near Ragusa, a town where he was to receive a prize on Sept. 3, and sustained severe head injuries. He was not wearing a helmet, Reuters said, and was riding with his girlfriend, who was unhurt in the crash.



Genetically Engineered Blue Roses



1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From The Telegraph

The firm [Suntory, a Japanese company] has invested three billion yen in the creation of blue roses, blue carnations and other blue flowers since 1990.

Its scientists successfully pioneered implanting the gene that produces Delphinidin, the primary plant pigment that produces a blue hue but is not found naturally in roses.

The world's first genetically modified blue roses were created in the laboratory four years ago, although further research was required to make them safe to grow in nature.

Following the cultivation of test batches in the United States and America, the company will be ready to sell them from next year and aims to open up a global market for blue flowers worth an estimated 30 billion yen.

The Approval Matrix: Week of September 26, 2011



Thursday, September 15, 2011

Evan Rachel Wood Got Tooth Knocked Out in Paris

4th NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From TMZ

Evan Rachel Wood took a serious shot to the face last night [September 9, 2011] in Europe. The actress was hanging out with some friends in Paris. One of the dancers at the establishment got a little loose with the elbows -- and accidentally connected with Wood's mouth, knocking out a tooth ... and giving her one fat lip.

Reese Witherspoon Hit by Car While Jogging

4th NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Metro

The bruised and battered actress stepped out for the first time to reveal the black eye and an injury to her forehead. The Legally Blonde star, who has recently remarried, was taken to hospital [in Santa Monica] after the accident - where an 85-year-old woman ran her down after failing to give way to her at a pedestrian crossing.

A spokesman for the mother said at the time: 'The actress was not seriously injured and is resting comfortably at home.' After being left ‘really frightened’ by the event, the 35-year-old Oscar winner was all smiles when she turned up with a big pressie for a pal’s birthday in LA.

Hotel Le Bleu Charges $2,000 to Hurricane Evacuees

4th NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix


A trendy Brooklyn hotel generated a flood of cash from Irene, jacking up the price of a room to $999 a night on Saturday as the powerful storm zeroed in on New York, employees said.

Hotel Le Bleu on Fourth Ave. in Park Slope upped the rates from its typical $250 a night as people poured in looking for a dry place to rest.

"It was just because of high demand," said an employee, who would not give her name. "A lot of hotels did that."But about 10 blocks away, at the Fairfield Inn & Suites on Third Ave., the rates remained unchanged from the usual $240 a night.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

SHUT UP LITTLE MAN!

3rd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix



SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! AN AUDIO MISADVENTURE - OFFICIAL TRAILER from Closer Productions on Vimeo.

Do Ho Suh's HOME WITHIN HOME @ Lehmann Maupin Gallery

2nd NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From LM

Home Within Home, by Do Ho Suh will present a series of works that reflect the artist’s ongoing exploration of themes surrounding cultural displacement and the co-existence of cultural identities, as well as the perception of our surroundings and how one constructs a memory of a space. Suh’s own feeling of displacement when he arrived in the U.S. in 1991 to study at RISD led him to measure spaces in order to establish relationships with his new surroundings. Years later, the artist developed the idea of taking these measurements and using them to replicate and transport spaces. Suh constructs these architectural spaces and the elements within them in various mediums including fabrics, resin, and Styrofoam. Among the works exhibited in this show will be Fallen Star 1/5, Home Within Home, and a series of fabric objects, all personally revealing works which invite viewers into his homes.

Do Ho Suh
Home Within Home
8 September – 22 October, 2011
540 West 26th Street

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

MY DYSLEXIA by Philip Schultz


1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Amazon

An inspiring memoir of a Pulitzer Prize winner’s triumph over disability. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the "dummy class" in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition.

In his moving memoir, Schultz traces his difficult childhood and his new understanding of his early years. In doing so, he shows how a boy who did not learn to read until he was eleven went on to become a prize-winning poet by sheer force of determination. His balancing act—life as a member of a family with not one but two dyslexics, countered by his intellectual and creative successes as a writer—reveals an inspiring story of the strengths of the human mind.


Dolphins Use Shells to Catch Fish

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

(From MSNBC)

Diamond Planet

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

(Reuters) - Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.

The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.
"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."

Monday, September 12, 2011

Ed Rollins Badmouths Rep. Michele Bachmann


1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Mother Jones by Andy Kroll

In late January, Rollins appeared on CNN, where he's been a frequent commentator, to discuss the Republican Party's response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. After praising Obama's speech and the GOP's official rebuttal, given by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Rollins dismissed Bachmann's poorly produced "tea party response." In doing so, Rollins questioned Bachmann's role as a credible Republican leader. Moreover, he suggested Bachmann ought not be representing the Republican Party.

Michele Bachmann obviously is a member of Congress and a representative of the tea party," Rollins told CNN viewers. "But at the end of the day, we have to get our serious players out front and talking about the things that matter to be the alternative to the president and Democrats." In other words, he did not consider Bachmann a "serious" GOP player.

Howard Dean, Iranian Group Lobbyist



1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix

From Salon by  JUSTIN ELLIOTT

Howard Dean has long cultivated an image as the plainspoken doctor who speaks for the left wing of the Democratic Party, a role he still plays as a pugnacious pundit on TV. But since his term as chairman of the Democratic National Committee ended in January 2009, Dr. Dean has taken on a less-noticed role: paid advocate for interest groups that would find few fans among the progressive voters once energized by Dean's 2004 presidential bid.

Dean is also currently one of the most prominent paid voices in a public-relations campaign on behalf of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an obscure and controversial Iranian militant group that is aggressively lobbying the Obama administration to remove it from the official list of terrorist organizations.

Senator David Wants to Watch Football Not Obama

1st NW Quadrant: The Approval Matrix


From The Hill by Justin Sink and Peter Sullivan

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) might be attending President Obama's job speech after all. Vitter, who had previously said that he would be skipping the speech to attend a party to watch the New Orleans Saints' kickoff game, tweeted Thursday morning that Senate scheduling might force him to attend.

"Typical Harry Reid. He's now schdld votes that should’ve been this morn 4 right b4 & right AFTER prez's speech. Pens me in 2 have 2 stay. Reid ensured I'll miss my Saints party at home. Don't worry--only strengthens my Who Dat resolve. On 2 the Super Bowl! #ReidDirtyBirdsFan?" tweeted Vitter.

The Approval Matrix: Week of September 19, 2011