I Announce This Contest!

I think we should have a contest here at Your Blog About Town, as a way of fostering convivial conversation and coming up with stuff to do instead of work. So, A Contest!

The contest is: Find the longest wikipedia entry that is obviously the work of a single individual.

For instance: the entry for the Richard Marx song "Hazard."

I am now winning, but soon you may be winning. Leave your entries in the comments; I will judge them on the two relevant categories, namely length and obviously the work of a single person-ness. The winner will be announced on Thursday, at some point, so you have until then.

Winner receives a free copy of the current issue of The L Magazine (offer not valid outside of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn).

Go! And tell your friends, if you have any.

An Online Guide to Brooklyn Stoop Sales

Taking the art of stoop sale-shopping to the next level: the brand-new Brooklyn Stoop, a blog listing upcoming Brooklyn stoop sales. It tells you where in Brooklyn to stroll on your way to brunch in case you want to rifle through someone else's homemade jewelry, old sneakers, frightening ceramic statues, and scarves that smell like cigarettes. To get your stoop sale listed, email bklynstoop@gmail.com, the earlier the better to ensure dozens of slow-moving people fingering through your things. Stoop sale season has begun.

True story: I found a nice Coach bag for $1 dollar at someone's stoop sale, it made me so happy that I felt embarrassed of myself. It came with a free tampon in the pocket, what luck!

Remember: Brooklyn Uncorked Tomorrow

Tomorrow, eat and drink all of Brooklyn's figurative milk, at Brooklyn Uncorked: Food. Wine. Beer. Chocolate. Cheese. Potato Chips. Sorbet. Natural Sodas. BBQ. Coffee. As much of it as you want, for $50, in a nice place (BAM). Last year's event sold out, but there are still a few tickets left for tomorrow, May 14th's, afternoon (4pm--why? I don't know) Brooklyn food bonanza. I wrote about it a couple weeks ago, if you want more descriptions of the food offered.

An Omnibus Film of New York-Centered Shorts, But Not That One

So apparently making short films about New York is a very chic thing to do at the moment. Though this kind of rhapsodic treatment is becoming a bit of cottage interest, to potentially detrimental effect. To that end, the Williamsburg filmmaking group Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective Beta presents "15 Films in 30 Minutes" tonight at Galapagos Art Space (a DJed reception follows). The dozen-plus participants were all given two minutes to make a movie about "Brooklyn" and "change," which could be bracing or funny or dicey or painful and will likely be all of the above in turn — but is at least an appropriate subject to tackle at a blink-and-you'll miss it pace on North 6th Street, which seems to cater to and be overrun by a different demographic every time I go down it. (Indeed, Galapagos is moving to DUMBO this summer, to the building pictured. So who else could host this event?) (Also, welcome to DUMBO having been driven from Williamsburg by rising rents, guys! You'll love it here.)

O Canada: Thank You for the Free Luxurious Food, Massages and Drinks

What do you think of when you think of Canada? Hockey. The flag with the leaf on it. The hockey team named after the leaves. Pamela Anderson. The L Magazine's editor-in-chief Jonny Diamond. Things that are clean.

But apparently someone, somewhere wants your mouth to water more, and for you to be drunker, when you think about Canada, so there's a promotional event tomorrow and Thursday with free food, free cocktails, free music, in a swanky location--to promote the natural gifts from our gentle, smarter northern neighbor. For the Ultimate Canadian Room-With-A-View, they've opened up an almost-never-open-to-the-public section of Rockefeller Center with crazy views, and you can just go there, check it out, and eat and drink and hang out to your heart's delight--for free. Almost perplexingly good, kind of like Canada itself. Here's what to expect:

-Cooking demonstrations from Ottawa’s Le Cordon Bleu, the North American hub of the prestigious international culinary arts network (with free dishes like stuffed tomatoes with Nova Scotia Lobster and Newfoundland Cod brandade)
-Spa treatments
-Interactive art from Toronto
-Musical performances by Montreal DJ Jérome Decis and the Chris Norman Duo
-An outdoor bar and lounge serving Canadian specialty drinks such as Montreal Gin & Sours (pictured) and Toronto bubble tea

Another Tuesday Night, Another Reading at the MoMA in Tribute to a Russian Futurist Romantic Poet

Says L Mag contributor David Varno in his review of the new anthology Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky:

In a decade when few prominent artists or writers are truly engaged in politics, particularly in this country, it is difficult to imagine a poet so much at the center of things as Vladimir Mayakovsky was during the Russian Revolution. It was a time of intense literary and artistic production, and as leader of the second wave of Futurism, Mayakovsky worked to change the way people created, understood and participated in art. But he was an ever-contradictory figure, one who would embrace Pushkin while also calling to destroy the static art of the past, and his poems’ lyricism and unapologetic internationalism — with nods to Whitman and Rimbaud — set him well beyond the polemical.

Fact: The Best and Worst Tasting Girl Scout Cookies

Our art director, Cecilia Ziko, hosts an annual Girl Scout Cookie-Tasting Party, after which all the cookie-tasters fill out a card ranking the cookies in order of tastiness. The party happened about three months ago, but Ms. Ziko has only just finished the complex and gruelling calculus of the popularity calculations, and these are the results:

Having recently cleaned off my desk and located a calculator that is not also a cellphone, I am pleased to announce the exciting results of the 6th annual girl scout cookie taste test party:

In 8th place [is the basically] unanimously disliked sugar free chocolate chip cookie.

At 7th place, despite its commemorative 95th anniversary redesign, is the shortbread cookie with the chocolate coated bottom, the all about.

6th place goes to the traditionalists' favorite, the trefoil.

Rounding out the bottom half of the table in 5th place is the uncontroversial but decidedly dry do-si-do peanut butter sandwich cookie.

Taking 4th place, despite the declaration by my senior-ranked Girl Scout cousin that "the lemon ones suck," is the alps evoking lemon chalet cream cookie.

Before announcing the top three cookies, I need to preface by saying that this was the closest and most surprising top-three cookie outcome in the six-year history of the taste-test party.

In 3rd place, a national favorite that hasn't won the taste test since 2006 is the thin mint.

In its highest ranking ever, edging out thin mints by a third of a point is runner-up--the tagalong.

And barely hanging on its title for the second year in a row is the winner, by seven hundredth of a point, the samoa.

Frida Kahlo in Philadelphia

Here's Patricia Milder's review of a centennial Frida Kahlo exhibition, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sunday, if you're going to be in the fifth borough any time soon, or like reading about Frida Kahlo.

The French poet and Surrealist theorist André Breton described Frida Kahlo’s work as a “ribbon around a bomb.” His support influenced her career and simultaneously encouraged association with the Surrealist movement, but Kahlo herself was self-taught and never fully engaged in identifying with a particular school. Sympathetic to both leftist political art and the artistic avant-garde, an argument can be made for her as the first contemporary artist – the first to place herself as the subject and object of her works, and to make her body into art. During her lifetime, Frida Kahlo was a modern artist’s artist, admired by Marcel Duchamp, Vassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, however, it is significant to note that her first and only solo exhibition in Mexico occurred in 1953, one year before her death.

The irony then, of the amusement park-like atmosphere of the current retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is frustratingly clear.

(Read the rest of this review here.)

Swingtown USA: Parents' Orgies in the '70s... on CBS?

The creepiest, most ridiculous television trailer I've seen in a while, also alluring:

Street Stories NYC

This is contributor Jessica Hall's weekly column, in which she interviews the homeless and street people she meets around the city. This week she spoke with Bailey, 18.

I’m Bailey, like Irish Cream. My dad named me after his first AA group, in the Bronx. I’m from here. I’m eventually trying to get to my friend in Pennsylvania—after that we have to go to Baltimore and buy a school bus. I grew up in Queens. I have a 7-year-old brother and a 22-year-old sister. My parents, they’re in Queens still, I see my dad sometimes. I really don’t like my mom.

Did you finish high school?

I got my GED. I dropped out of high school when I was 17.

How long have you been on the streets?

I started hanging out when I was 15. I started staying out a couple nights a week, and after than I was like, screw this. I just left home altogether. My parents didn’t abuse me, they kind of neglected me as a person. I had a bad uncle, and my mother didn’t call the cops on him. She wouldn’t call the cops on her brother, but you’re supposed to take care of your child before anything. When you have a child it’s supposed to be the most important thing in your life. That’s why I don’t want kids!

Where do you live now?

Nowhere. Anywhere. I sleep at a school a couple blocks away sometimes, or over by the river. In the winter it sucks. When it rained the other day we woke up and we were soaked right through the sleeping bags. I hardly have a voice right now.

It’s not bad ‘cause I’m a girl, people just give you money cause you’re a chick.

What do you do in a day?

Not much, go to the drop-in center or stay in the park and drink beer, or we do this, which is not hard. I’m saving money for my camera. Since I just turned 18 I have savings from when I was younger and I was a model, and I’m gonna take that to tune up the bus. It’s a pretty good investment cause I can live in it and travel in it and I’m going to make a room with a lock and a safe.
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Recommended!

This is the weekly feature in which I recommend the best things I did last weekend. Like most weekends these days in the twilight of my youth, I stayed close to home and didn't leave Brooklyn once. Good job, Edith. Soon I'll probably spontaneously give birth to an expensive stroller filled with plastic clogs. Anyway: Recommended!

Art: The Takashi Murakami exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum! Mostly I'm just patting myself on the back for finally going to the show I've wanted to see for weeks, that's at the museum that's literally 600 feet from my house. But I went, and it was cool. A little dizzying at times, and it trends toward the repetitive, but some really neat and hypnotic stuff. Most memorable (but not the best, just most memorable) were the two human-sized statues of sparkle-eyed anime figures: one was a girl with giant blue pigtails and gargantuan cow breasts, clad uselessly in a dime-sized string bikini that was pushed aside to make room for the bursts of milk coming from her nipples and encircling her body in a crazy hoop. Opposite her was a Peter Pan-like blonde anime boy with a giant boner ejaculating a lassoo of ... ejaculate, which he was holding onto with his hand. They were nuts, click here to see them. But mostly the exhibition, which spans two floors, features huge and stunningly vivid paintings (like the awesome Tan Tan Bo Puking, pictured, except 20 times bigger)--as well as a 4 real Louis Vuitton shop embedded in the middle of the show, complete with silk-voiced, white-suited LV employees. Tickets for the Murakami show must be purchased separately: $10 regular, $8 students. Closes July 13. Recommended!

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Film Criticism You Can Use

Writing about Film Forum's Godard's 60s series and the Walter Reade's 1968: An International Perspective series in the current L, Michael Joshua Rowin posits the theory that "the 60s belonged to Jean-Luc Godard." An ambitious theory you might test out today: Godard's prankish meta-movie musical A Woman Is a Woman plays at Film Forum, perhaps showcasing Godard's tendency towards "joining the jagged rhythms of pop with free-floating cinematic and philosophical detritus," and "dissolving distinctions between cinema as sociological documentation and as funhouse genre collage."

Meanwhile, up at Lincoln Center, there are a couple matinees of films mjr suggests as having that kind of aesthetically and socially ambitious mash-up outlook: "Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, a gonzo documentary about/enactment of the sexual revolution preached by Wilhelm Reich," and "Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, a media critique and fictional intrusion into the real unfolding violence of the ’68 Democratic convention." So go, and tell us if we're right.