In Struggling Economy, Community Boards Open To Compromise

One Brooklyn Community Board 6 member explains the difference between “stripping” and “burlesque”:

Community Board 6’s Public Safety Committee voted unanimously to recommend a liquor license for Dave Ruggiero and the Paris Burlesque Club that he plans to open this spring on Commerce Street.

. . .

“This is as reasonable as an establishment like this can be.”

People, If You’re Going To Trip Up And Destroy Art, Please Try To Do It In The Ancient Near Eastern Art Galleries Or Something; That Stuff Is Boring

Oy:

A clutzy art lover tripped onto a rare Picasso painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tearing a hole in the century-old masterpiece, the museum said Sunday.

Location Scout: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

If It’s Not Masturbating Cowboys, It’s Extremely Close Up Vulvas

You can’t win with these people:

It’s O.K. if P.S. 1 wants to show vulvas in extreme close-up. (I don’t believe in censorship.) What’s not O.K. is that the only warning to parents was a tiny sign at the entrance to the gallery. The wording was clear — “These galleries contain graphic imagery. Parent/adult discretion is advised” — but the size and style of the sign made it unlikely that any harried parent would even notice it.

P.S. 1 is hardly the only local museum that has let me down. A Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008 was a major draw for parents and kids. The first piece on display, a teaser in the museum’s lobby, was a playful sculpture of cartoonlike characters, which made my sons want to see more.

So it came as a shock when, entering the main exhibition space, we were greeted by a masturbating cowboy spinning a lasso of his semen.

That’s How You Use The Bully Pulpit

The Obama Effect:

The Broadway show that President and First Lady Obama saw Saturday night got a big boost at the box office yesterday.

The number of advance tickets sold yesterday for “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” was triple that of the previous Sunday, according to a production source.

The Scottish King! The Scottish King!

More like “Macbeth!”:

“The last 15 years have been boom years for theater — I always expected the pendulum to swing, and I simply see this as a correction,” said Nancy Coyne, chairwoman of the theater advertising agency Serino Coyne. “The good news is that so many straight plays are now coming in the spring, and I think New Yorkers will come out for them once the tourists go away. We’re horrible snobs. We hate tourists from Cleveland.”

Just keep telling yourself that.

Personally, I can’t wait to sink my teeth into “the story of a world traveling photojournalist and a New York gallery owner who discover each other and also that there might be an art to repairing broken lives” (“Impressionism”). And nothing takes my mind off of a worldwide economic crisis like a new Moises Kaufman play about “a musicologist who travels to the Beethoven archives in Germany to unravel the mystery surrounding the composer’s enigmatic ‘Diabelli Variations,’ only to discover she has a fatal illness” (“33 Variations”). Oh and hey, what better way is there for New York theatergoers to forget eight years of Bush than an uplifting Ibsen revival? “Hedda sets out on a shocking path of destruction that affects the lives of everyone around her” — I remember that one! — but it does have the hot lady from Weeds. Aw, alright — send me a postcard with some midweek discount and I’ll think about it . . .