DAILY MAGPIE – EVERYDAY – Snow day at NYPL

Sometimes during a big, fat, slushy snowstorm it seems like nothing in this world could draw you out of hibernation and onto the streets – but even the most hardened winter hermit could be coaxed into warming up in a giant, ornate high-ceilinged hall filled with oil paintings and beautiful old editions of books, or in an archive filled with thousands of videos or illustrations. Here are a few branches worth spending an afternoon in:

New York Picture Library: Look up and scan images of anything from Accidents to Burma, Cartoons, Quails, Rainbows or Sunsets.
Location: Picture Collection, Third Floor / 455 5th Avenue at 40th St.

Art & Architecture Room: You can’t take out any of the books, but you can xerox them. Write down the titles and the staff will bring you a stack. Look up anything from Outsider Art to Mati Klarwein to one of many titles on how to construct a tent in the wild.
Location: Room 300 / 42nd St. & 5th Avenue Branch of The New York Public Library

Film/Video Collection: This branch holds many thousands of videocassettes and DVDs of anything you can think of, including documentaries, world cinema, educational videos and video art, all to be watched for free at any time. Also at this branch: Music & recorded sound collections, including world music and whacked-out experimental recordings. Go crazy.
Location: Donnell Media Center / 40 Lincoln Plaza between 5th ave & 6th ave

For more info and hours, visit http://www.nypl.org

Price: F-R-E-E

DAILY MAGPIE – January 18th – ZEBULON

AMI DANG

UNICORNICOPIA

ILYA MONOSOV

Ami Dang melds classical Sitar with haunting vocals and an array of electronic vibrations to produce an unearthly sound that is truly her own. Unicornicopia complements the night with bizarre orchestral arrangements, synthesized plips and plops, and bubble-gum lyrics that bite you before you realize what’s coming. Ilya Monosov tops it off with wintry strings and synths, and maybe even a hurdy-gurdy if we’re lucky…

Date & Time: January 18th, 2009 – 10PM

Venue: ZEBULON (BROOKLYN)

Address: 258 Wythe Avenue / Brooklyn, NY 11211

Directions:

L to Bedford

JMZ to Marcy

G to Metropolitan

Price: F-R-E-E!

Medical Marijuana Pr0n

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Did you know that the “C” in CNBC stands for “consumer?” We always thought it was for “Canadian,” when we thought about it at all. They’ve got some probably dumb tee vee especial about “America’s marijuana industry thriving and making bazillions of dollars like never before” coming up and it’s called MARIJUANA INK so maybe it’s also about horrible pot tattoos. (Wocka wocka it’s actually Inc. like incorporated). Ask your friend who still has television reception to tape it for you, I guess.

Anyway, in the run-up to their big reefer show, Consumer NBC’s got some doof named “Danny Danko” from embarrassing pot magazine High Times giving us the current market price of 12 different cannabis strains in a lovingly photographed slideshow. If you have not looked at High Times in awhile — like a decade, say — it is a real hoot because they actually do marijuana porn now. Like pictures of naked women either rolling around in marijuana, or with pot leaves magically Photoshopped onto their skin. It is truly gross and hilarious. Anyway, enjoy the weed pitchers. (via anonymous tipster/Boing Boing)

Taibbi and Rees Double-Teamin' Friedman

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It’s fun to drive around in Los Angeles and every time you pass by a strip mall with signs in English, Spanish, Tagalog and Thai to say “that strip mall looks like a Thomas Friedman column.” Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi (author of the infamous “52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope” piece) gets a bit more clever than that in this review of Friedman’s latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. For added fun David “Get Your War On” Rees has created a comics version of the review. From “Flat N All That,” available in its entirety in the New York Press:

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

More after the jump …

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Patrick McGoohan and The Prisoner

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Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of the TV adventure series with both hands and subverted the expectations of the audience and the people who were paying for it. Best because it dared to do this at a time when there was little precedent for experiment in a medium that was barely a decade old. Best because it had something important to say while still being entertaining. And best because it had Patrick McGoohan in the central role at the peak of his acting career.

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I am not a number! I am a free man!: Patrick McGoohan RIP

Growing up in pre-internet rural central Indiana, there was no cable television and the radio was awful which basically meant late-night PBS programming was totally mind-blowing for your contributing editor. Dr. Who, Monty Python and most amazing among them all for its sheer menacing weirdness, The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan, the star of the crushingly brilliant 1967 dystopian sci-fi spy series died on January 13, 2009 at age 80.

AMC has the whole series up online and it’s just gorgeous. Watch it here.

Read McGoohan’s obituary from the Guardian after the jump.

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Bloody Mary Morning Music: Two Classic Willie LPs

Laying My Burdens Down

Both Sides Now

Last time your contributing editor saw Willie Nelson it was with Arthur columnist Dave Reeves and we were at the Hollywood Bowl. Given that it was an audience full of KCRW-dads out to let their hair down, it wasn’t more than 15 minutes before the overweight yuppies were trying to buy pot from us, just based on the length of your contributing editor’s hair. They even plied us with non-medicinal brownies, but to no avail. Same yuppies were less enamored with us as we shouted and whooped along with “Beer For My Horses” and the other classics that Willie and family ran through in a pretty mechanical way.

One of the things your ed forgets about Willie’s three thousand albums or so is that very few of them are comprised of rowdy honky-tonkers: Most of the guy’s catalog is made up of very mellow and often heartbreakingly sad acoustic affairs full of songs that never make his live setlist, nevermind country radio. That’s pretty much what we’ve got here with these two overlooked gems from 1970: Both Sides Now and Laying My Burdens Down. This is pre-Outlaw Willie, though there are shades of things to come with “I Gotta Get Drunk,” an early version of “Bloody Mary Morning” and the gospel-tinged sounds that would come to full bloom in 1976 on his totally amazing Troublemaker album. Also plenty of tasteful covers; his revision of “Both Sides Now” ranks alongside Sinatra’s as among the sweeter covers of the Joni Mitchell classic.

Both come courtesy of Crooner’s Corner, a no-frills audioblog overseen by a wonderfully curmudgeonly collector of music by “male singers and musical entertainers of fame and legend.” Go check ’em out here.

DAILY MAGPIE – January 15- February 13 – Christopher Miner

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Take the Christian anthem Via Dolorosa made popular by Sandi Patti in the late 80’s, this dude in drag dressed Dana Carvey Church lady-style singing with the tune in eerily good falsetto, and put his lifeless, singing body in front of an alter with…  I think I may have said too much.  Some of the photos have an Eggleston quality to them- great Americana color photography depicting the (mostly white) common man/woman/family.  Miner adds extra irony and humor in his photos and video installtions, and with this show Easter for the Birds, a re-born Christian twist.  Good Goddamn.

Date and Time:  Opening Reception January 15 6-8

Venue:  Mitchell-Innes and Nash Chelsea

Address:  534 West 26th Street 

Price:  Free

DAILY MAGPIE – January 16 and so on – Fridays 6-9 at the Whitney

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Every Friday from 6-9p.m. the Whitney Museum has a pay-as-you-wish window.  I wish for unicorns.  But like money, I haven’t any.  Instead I get an amazing and free glimpse into one of the largest one-time collections and the only U.S. retrospective of the great photographer, William Eggleston.  The show runs through January 25 and includes not only nearly all his black and white and color prints from over 40 years, but also his films from the 1970s.  Go see some Americana before we mortgage it to China.