A BLAB! retrospective art show opens on March 26th at Society of Illustrators in Manhattan featuring 100 works of art.

BLAB!, a periodic anthology of visual art, was founded by Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp in 1986. Characterized by an emphasis on comics, the first seven issues of BLAB! were produced in a digest-sized format (5½” x 8½”), printed in black-and-white with a color cover, and contained illustrated stories by such figures as Joe Coleman, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Drew Friedman, Chris Ware, and ZAP artist Spain Rodriguez.

via Fantagraphics & Boing Boing

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The 140 Characters Conference, an event explores the real-time Internet organized by Jeff Pulver, returns to New York City April 20-21 at 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

The #140conf events provide a platform for the worldwide twitter community to: listen, connect, share and engage with each other, while collectively exploring the effects of the emerging real-time internet on business.

Laughing Squid is one of the media sponsors of 140 Characters Conference NYC.

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Cafe Grumpy photo by Scott Beale

Over the years I’ve noticed how the coffee situation in New York City has been steadily improving. Not long ago it was all Starbucks and Duncan Donuts, but that’s no longer the case. Oliver Strand of The New York Times takes a look at the best places to find good coffee in NYC, including a super handy interactive map.

photo by Scott Beale

The article mentions how San Francisco’s Four Barrel Coffee will be roasting in NYC soon. In the last year Oakland’s Blue Bottle opened a cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Portland’s Stumptown Coffee opened a cafe at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan, along with a roastery in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

via Buzz Andersen

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photos by Scott Beale

The Street Sweets and Rickshaw Dumpling trucks spotted last week in the Upper West Side doing their thing in front of the Fairway Market.

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photos by Eric Harvey Brown

Eric Harvey Brown shot some wonderful photos of Sunday’s Phagwah 2010 parade in Richmond Hill, Queens, celebrating the Hindu festival of Holi.

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photos by Scott Beale

A few photos I shot last week while visiting the Apple Store in SOHO.

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Brett Camper created an interactive 8-Bit Map of NYC using data from OpenStreetMap and now has a Kickstarter project to expand it to 15 other cities around the world.

I hope that these maps will evoke the same urge for exploration and abstract sense of scale that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers. Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Let’s set out on an 8-bit quest!

via Waxy

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photo by Scott Beale

Last week we came across this massive macrame owl hanging on the wall at the J. Crew in SOHO. You can’t tell from the photo, but is was several feet high and wide.

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The Shorty Awards, honoring the best producers of short, real-time content, will be streaming live from the awards ceremony tonight in NYC starting at 7:30ET/4:30PT.

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photo by Scott Beale

NYC street promo for the new Comedy Central animated horror-comedy series Ugly Americans that premieres on March 17th.

Take New York City, add every horrifying beast, science-fiction freak, and fantasy faerie, shake thoroughly, and you’ve got UGLY AMERICANS. This animated horror-comedy series follows one Mark Lilly, social worker at the Department of Integration, as he helps new citizens both human and “other” adapt to hectic life in the Big Apple.

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“The Sandpit”, a wonderful tilt-shift video created by Sam O’Hare that features a day in the life of New York City.

via Neatorama

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illustration by Jessica Namnum

Time Out NYC takes a look at the age old debate: Brooklyn vs. Manhattan

It’s a time-honored tradition to identify strongly with a borough, and the chest-thumping has gotten louder in recent years as more and more Manhattanites (or their boyfriends or girlfriends) move to Brooklyn. It’s tempting to pick sides over issues of transportation, finances, square footage, conveniences, attitude and culture. Are you Brooklyn? Or Manhattan? And will the two—should the two—ever be thought of as one?

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photos by Scott Beale

New York City and most of the East Coast has been getting a substantial amount of snow over the last couple of days. I’ve been going out and shooting some photos of the Snowpocalypse.

Video of the big fluffy snow falling in Hell’s Kitchen on Thursday.

Snowpocalypse NYC even has it’s own venue on Foursquare with over 2200 checkins.

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Lori models Siberian Apparel, the new winter line from American Apparel.

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Burgers & Cupcakes in Hell’s Kitchen, what else do you need?

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Foodprint NYC, part of a series of “international conversations about food and the city”, takes place on Saturday, February 27th at Studio-X in Manhattan.

From a cluster analysis of bodega inventories to the cultural impact of the ice-box, and from food deserts to peak phosphorus, panelists will examine the hidden corsetry that gives shape to urban foodscapes, and collaboratively speculate on how to feed New York in the future. The free afternoon program will include designers, policy-makers, flavor scientists, culinary historians, food retailers, and others, for a wide-ranging discussion of New York’s food systems, past and present, as well as opportunities to transform our edible landscape through technology, architecture, legislation, and education.

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We hear about them often; there is visibility in our culture when it comes to soldier casualties in Iraq, but civilian casualties remain largely invisible — in the media at least, but not in life. Iraqi performance artist Wafaa Bilal is planning to literally turn his body into a permanent work that will have him making these casualties painfully visible, and he will carry the legacy of civilian deaths in Iraq with him the rest of his life. In effect, Bilal already does this, having lost his brother to a checkpoint missile in 2004. Starting at 8pm on March 8th at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC, Bilal will begin the first 24 hours of …and Counting, where he will get tattooed for each American and Iraqi civilian casualty, film the process, and is endeavoring to livestream the performance. Bilal’s artist statement reads:

…and Counting addresses this double standard as Bilal turns his own body – in a 24-hour live performance — into a canvas, his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty near the cities where they fell. The 5,000 dead American soldiers are represented by red dots (permanent visible ink), and the 100,000 Iraqi casualties are represented by dots of green UV ink, seemingly invisible unless under black light. During the performance people from all walks of life read off the names of the dead.

Also, Bilal is asking each visitor to donate $1 which will go to the group Rally for Iraq, to fund scholarships for Americans and Iraqis who lost parents in the war. Based on official numbers of casualties, one dollar for each would mean $105,000 in scholarship money.

When: 8pm March 8 to 8pm March 9, 2010
Where: Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
Blackburn 20/20
323 W39th Street 5th Floor NY, NY 10018

via We Make Money Not Art

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photo by Scott Beale

ENRON, the play written by Lucy Prebble based on the ENRON Corporation scandal, is coming to Broadway, opening on April 27th at the Broadhurst Theatre.

One of the most infamous scandals in financial history becomes a theatrical epic in Lucy Prebbles new play. Mixing classical tragedy with savage comedy, it follows a group of flawed men and women in a narrative of greed and loss which reviews the tumultuous 1990s and casts a new light on the financial turmoil in which the world finds itself in 2009.

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photos by Scott Beale

Last week Lori and I were walking through Union Square in Manhattan and we came across our friend Joe Mangrum who was creating one of his beautiful sand paintings on the sidewalk. Like all of his ephemeral sand paintings, this one was swept up by Joe at the end of the day.

Joe recently released a book of his art “Painting New York”. If you run into him in NYC you can purchase a copy in person using Square. He’s one of the first street artists who is using Square for payments, hopefully more will in the future.

If you are in NYC follow Joe on Twitter to see where he’ll be doing his next sand painting.

Photo Gallery: Joe Mangrum Sand Painting

See Previously: Painting New York, Sand Paintings by Joe Mangrum

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Comedian Mark Malkoff asked New Yorkers to help carry him across Manhattan in order to prove his point that New York City is a nice place. Mark’s attempt earned him an URDB record for the Furthest Distance To Be Carried By Other People.

via Zoomdoggle

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