The Time Out New York blog

Your up-to-the-minute guide to New York City events, restaurants, bars, nightlife, ticket alerts and NSFW ephemera.

    Plush life

    Fri Sep 7

    We couldn't get all the way through Paul Haggis's 2004 West Coast guiltfest, Crash (okay, we shut it off after ten minutes). Fortunately, Cherry Red Productions has created a vastly more engaging version using Care Bears in lieu of sanctimonious Hollywood types. (Come to think of it, that might work for the pending screenwriters strike, too.) Note how much more palatable the Thandie Newton--fingering scene is when performed by Funshine Bear.

    Ars longa, suckers

    Fri Sep 7

    Turn that frown upside down! Saturday at 4pm is the Art Parade, in which dozens of revelers shimmy down West Broadway from Houston to Grand Street, garbed in outrageous outfits, scathing political placards, portable sculptures, origami kites, papier-mch heads and tableaux of all stripes. Is it pretentious and just a little bit silly? Yes—but it's two fucking months till Halloween and we have a werewolf Giuliani costume that we're dying to try out.

    The Toad Elevating Moment

    Thu Sep 6

    The title of this post was a potential name for the show eventually called Monty Python's Flying Circus. This and other hilarious sundries were revealed last night by Michael Palin at the 92nd Street Y. Palin, whose book Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years went on sale this week, chatted casually with Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels about the book, shared stories from various sets and shoots, and discussed the artistic innocence of the late '60s and early '70s. Beyond the jump, highlights: * The location of Palin's first comedy gig: the Oxford University Psychological Society Christmas Party. (The guests didn't laugh much.) * How Palin referred to the Pythons' penises during the group's famous Richard Avedon photo shoot: "Our little tadgers." * How Michaels responded when Palin asked him if he ever believes it when comedy pros say, "That's really funny" instead of laughing: "The only thing worse than 'That was funny' is 'That will work.' " * An excerpt from...

    From the marketing dept: How to plan an awesome food tasting

    Wed Sep 5

    All right. Labor Day has come and gone, and with it, your "summertime haze" excuse for not already buying tickets to Eat Out '07. Even though you may have been slacking off for a month—or longer—that's not true for us here in the marketing department at Time Out New York. We've been as busy as beavers, laying the preliminary groundwork for Eat Out '07, which, as you may recall, is our biggest event of the year. Of course, with something so monumental, we don't do it alone. I'll be the first to admit that I alone don't possess the skills to pull off something this huge, which involves corralling 40 top-notch restaurants (and their chefs and restaurateurs) into one space for a night of dining, drinks, dancing and more. Thus, we call in the experts at Match Catering and Eventstyles, who pretty much wrote the book on producing fun, sexy food events. This week, I decided to put my newly honed interview skills to work on our contact at Match, Erin Gitlin. To her infinite credit, she...

    (West) Indian summer

    Tue Sep 4

    I could've hit the snooze bar yesterday morning, but the temptation of a workless Monday couldn't distract me from the mantra playing in my head: "I will shake that ass today if it's the last thing that I do. " In order to really get my party on, I would have to get to where to the people were: The West Indian--American Day Carnival on Eastern Parkway. After the Jamaican-patois-speaking 2 train conductor introduced Grand Army Plaza as "the place you'll get your drink and two-step on," I knew it was my stop. Armed with a mango Icee and a tub of pineapple lemonade, I made my way to the heart of the festivities, watching as locals locked their doors and peeped through windows at the swelling crowd of loud-and-proud Caribbeans. Not wanting to be the only loser in the crowd with an American flag, I went unclaimed, gliding through a sea of gyrating, smiling, singing and colorful folks waving T-shirts and banners from Haiti, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago,...

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  • Senior Editor: Amy Plitt (@plitter)