-
Lorem Ipsum
-
Page
1
of
2
1
|
2
»
-
10 Jul 2011
Central Park gets all the attention, but NYC is full of lovely smaller green spots. One of my favorites, City Hall Park, plays host this summer to an outdoor retrospective exhibition of the works of master of minimalism and conceptualism Sol LeWitt. These pieces really work for me in a way that they would not in a white box gallery: Nestled among the greenery, the stark white ‘open cubes' remind me of 70s sci-fi flicks like Rollerball and Logan's Run which used the minimalist aesthetic to evoke the future, and the candy-colored melty mountains just make me smile.
Posted by Angelo
art
|
newyork
|
nynellynews
Comments
1
-
02 Feb 2011
Angelo's New York Nelly News
RIP Brenda Starr
Back in the 1970s the Sunday comics were full of long-running strips like Dick Tracy and L'il Abner, which still carried a whiff of 1940s-style glamour that seemed exotic and mysterious when I first discovered them. And none was more glamorous than Brenda Star, Reporter, a raven-haired bombshell with a dramatic beauty mark a la Eve Arden who zoomed around the globe chasing after hot stories and foiling schemes for world domination and such. (She bears more than a passing resemblance to Panti, if you ask me - right down to her trademark saucy smirk.) She was a proto-feminist vixen: Strong, courageous and a hot tamale to boot.
And despite being an independent woman and all, she was not immune to the masculine allure of the dashing yet slightly dangerous Basil St. John, her tragically doomed one-eyed paramour (think James Bond with an eyepatch). Brenda wasn't the only one who was smitten! And though I hadn't read the strip in years, I loved the idea that she carried on, a link to a more innocent pop culture past. So it was a sad day indeed when, on Jan. 2, after over 70s years, Brenda finally walked off into the sunset and off the comics pages for the very last time.
Hardbound compilations of the collected strips are apparently on the way, which is a relief, and in the meantime, you check out clips of the rotten 1989 film version on YouTube. Despite starring the ever-lovely Brooke Shields in the title role, It's a misbegotten mess with little to recommend it other than Timothy Dalton at the peak of his hotness as Basil and Brooke looking adorable in those 40s polka dot outfits.
(Posted by Angelo - nynellynews@gmail.com)
nynellynews
|
people
|
movies
|
comics
Comments
1
-
31 Jan 2011
Our New York bureau chief has been quiet of late, but being snowed in has driven him back to his laptop:
Angelo's New York Nelly News
Gays in the Military a Threat to Wildlife
When thousands of black birds fell from the sky on New Year's Eve in Arkansas, with no apparent cause of death initially visible, their wings had barely stopped flapping before the conspiracy nuts were speculating that the cause might be everything from secret military tests involving poison gas to UFOs or even the end of the world. The fact that a few weeks earlier thousands of fish had turned up dead in a nearby river only whipped the nuts up into further frenzy.
But the prize for the most ludicrous bit of magical thinking has to go to Texas minister Cindy Jacobs, who managed to tie the demise of these unfortunate fowls to, of all things, the December repeal of the US military's Don't' Ask, Don't Tell ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the ranks. And the link? The policy was originally implemented in 1993 by then-president Bill Clinton, who before that was of course governor of what state? That's right, ARKANSAS! Spooky. And to make it even eerier, the birds fell near a town called Beebe, and the current governor of Arkansas is named Beebe, though how that connects to DADT is totally unclear to this atheist. But one thing is absolutely clear to Cindy: God is not happy, and He just might take out a few of his other creatures to demonstrate His displeasure: "It could be because we have said it's okay for people who commit these kinds of acts to be recognized in our military for the first time in our history, there is a potential that there is something that actually happened in the land where a hundred thousand drum fish died and also where these birds just fell out of the air."
Now how can you argue with airtight logic like that? The scientific explanation of course, turns out to be much more prosaic: The birds, who have poor eyesight and rarely fly at night, were roused by celebratory fireworks and died after receiving blunt head trauma when they flew into trees, buildings and such. But scientists are still flummoxed about what killed the fish, so maybe it's really just the lesbians that God is angry about.
Posted by Angelo.
Contact: nynellynews@gmail.com
nynellynews
|
nuts
|
nature
|
gay rights
Comments
2
-
11 Dec 2010
The blog's foreign correspondent Angelo is getting to interview all the fun ladies for Paper magazine recently. Last time it was Joan Collins and Pam Ann and now it's Joanna Lumley.
people
|
theatre
|
usa
|
nynellynews
Comments
0
-
03 Aug 2010
From our foreign correspondent Angelo.
I ♥ Miss NY!!!
At last year's Miss USA pageant, when Miss California Carrie Prejean, a fundamentalist Christian, was asked to share her thoughts on gay marriage, her somewhat inarticulate response went like this:
"Well I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that's how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman."
Her combination of small minded intolerance and folksy mangled syntax seemed a perfect metaphor for all that's worst in American culture - a whored-up brain-dead Christian bottle blonde (the pageant lent her $5000 for a boob job) preaching family values while shaking her half-naked ass for fame and fortune on national TV. And you could cut the irony with a knife when she was later forced to give up her title when a solo sex tape she'd made surfaced. But, gosh, she was darn purty for a hypocritical moron.
Well this year New York seems to have found the perfect antidote to Prejean's inane intolerance. I was just tickled pink to learn that our own Miss America contender this year won by making equal rights for gays her ‘platform.' (Did you know that beauty pageant contestants had platforms? Neither did I.). Turns out the fabulous Claire Buffie, our newly crowned Miss New York, has a lesbian sister and is a board member of the local PFLAG chapter. And she is no brainless beauty! In fact, she comes across as far more intelligent and composed than the well-meaning but rather wan news anchor (who looks a little light in the loafers himself if you ask me) when talking with evident passion about her commitment to equal rights for ALL Americans. I'm going to have to take back everything bad I've ever said about beauty queens!
"... that's the thing, is that gay rights, this term of gay rights is an umbrella term for so many different issues and so many people only equate it with marriage, but we - this is an issue that affects youth and teens and people who are sitting and staring at their laptop and looking at their Facebook and the bullying, the cyberbullying that's gone on to a point where they want to take their own lives. And that's something that we can't avoid talking about this subject anymore, we need to bring it to the forefront of conversations in American families."
You go, girl, and bring home the gold!
Contact Angelo: nynellynews@gmail.com
nynellynews
Comments
0
-
27 Jul 2010
Our New York correspondent Angelo interviews the Tony Award winning and Emmy nominated comediene/actress/singer (30 Rock, Ally McBeal) in Paper Magazine.
See? Nothing but quality people working on this blog. (Woof!) And a dog! (Sorry Penny)
Angelo: nynellynews@gmail.com
people
|
nynellynews
Comments
2
-
10 Jul 2010
Angelo's New York Nelly News
Marriage equality on TV a sign of the US times
In the US, The Today Show is about as mainstream as you can get - it's the flagship network morning show filled with a sunny mix of light news, health reporting, and celebrity gossip and such, so the news that it is opening up its annual wedding contest to gay couples for the first time this year is cause for celebration.
I didn't even know that the Today Show had an annual wedding contest, but the fact that they're treating gay marriages as equal to straight ones says that middle America is well on its way to internalizing this notion, no matter what the right-wing nuts and the law may say about it. Even though they are taking the inevitable heat for it from the right-wing haters, there's no way that a top-rated show at an ultra-cautious US network would take this stance without careful marketing calculations, so my guess is the numbers are on our side. So we gays can take heart that despite the legal setbacks same-sex marriage has suffered in the US - sure it's allowed in 5 states, but it's been defeated in all 31 others in which it's been directly put to a popular vote and thirty states have passed constitutional amendments prohibiting it -mainstream cultural acceptance for the idea continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Part of the problem is that most straights who support gay marriage don't care enough about it to get out and vote, while the fundamentalist nut-jobs get all riled up and send church busses full of voters to the polls when something like Proposition 8 gets on a ballot. Down with democracy!
This was in fact a subtext of an encouraging legal ruling relating to gay marriage this week. Federal judge Joseph Tauro struck down key portions of the hateful 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the federal law which defined marriage as a legal union exclusively between one man and one woman because, he determined, it was driven solely by a wish to pander to popular prejudice against gays:
Tauro concluded that DoMA was driven only by animus against gay people. And animus alone is not a legitimate basis for the government to act. "If the Constitution means anything, it does at the very least mean that the Constitution will not abide a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group," Tauro wrote.
Posted by Angelo: nynellynews@gmail.com
nynellynews
|
marriage equality
Comments
2
-
09 Jun 2010
Happy Birthday to our sassy squirrel and foreign correspondent, Angelo. Hopefully he's making some NY Nelly News of his own tonight in celebration.
nynellynews
Comments
0
-
19 May 2010
Our foreign correspondent Angelo (of Angelo's New York Nelly News) has an interview in Paper Magazine with the legendary Mitzi Gaynor about her extravagant up-coming broadway show.
people
|
theatre
|
movies
|
nynellynews
Comments
0
-
14 May 2010
Angelo's New York Nelly News
God Bless Alabama
Like many New Yorkers, I started out someplace else: I was born and raised down South, in Atlanta, Georgia. And though I retain many fond memories of my southern upbringing - let's start with home baked biscuits, buttermilk cornbread and sweet iced tea - it's hard for me to imagine again living in a place dubbed - for good reason - the Bible Belt. For the most part, like great Georgia writer Carson McCullers, I feel the need to return to the South periodically to renew my sense of horror.
And nothing is more horrifying than southern politics, whose unsavory swill of religious zealotry and coded racial slurs bring to mind a circus freakshow held out back of a tent revival. But this ad in the governor's race in Alabama attacking a candidate for supporting the teaching of evolution in schools, took my breath away.
The woman's voice - dripping with smug honey-coated hate - is a fabulous example of how genteel southern style can smooth over the nastiest reality - you know, like slaves and lynchings and such.
Even more shocking - and discouraging - than the ad itself is the candidate's response, vociferously denying that he would ever toss aside his bible in favor of the cockamamie notion like evolution:
" I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true...
I have never wavered in my belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God... I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books."
Posted by Angelo: nynellynews@gmail.com
nynellynews
|
politics
|
religion poisons everything
|
science
Comments
0
-
Page
1
of
2
1
|
2
»