Ace Hotel Weblog

For his 2012 TED Talk, 365 days after he initiated the...

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:33:00 -0700

For his 2012 TED Talk, 365 days after he initiated the Inside Out project, French artist JR was asked to answer the question “Can art change the world?” As an artist who’s made the world his gallery, he knows that the world can change art as well.

With huge black and white portraits of the unknown pasted on the hillside homes of Rio’s slums, on the trains of Phnom Penh, Times Square and the rooftops of Kenya, JR has used his medium to amplify the energy and humanity of the world’s everyday people. With Face 2 Face, the largest illegal photography project ever, JR and collaborator Marco pasted portraits of Israelis on the Palestinian side of the wall and vice-versa, so both communities could look into each other’s eyes without government intervention. Women are Heroes celebrated the strength and courage of women in Sierra Leone, India or Cambodia who are confronted with war, violence and abuse on a daily basis, calling the world’s attention to the faces of these incredible women. With The Wrinkles of the City, JR exalted our elders in Los Angeles, Shanghai and La Havana — those who’ve laid the foundation for culture, innovation, language, survival and tradition in each city in the world.

Paper and glue: “It is as simple as that,” JR says. He offers the medium to anyone who waits on line at one of his larger-than-life photobooths, or requests that their photo be printed through his site. His conviction to democratize his medium earned him the title “humanity revelator” from French newspaper Le Monde, championing art for its essence: spontaneous, collective and free.

Because of the proportions the project took in less than two years, a documentary was realized, showing how people from different cultures, lifestyles and experiences were able to take part into this project and make it theirs.

For another month or so, you can catch a documentary about Inside Out on HBO.

Harold Lloyd isn’t trying to stop time in this famous...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:15:24 -0700

Harold Lloyd isn’t trying to stop time in this famous scene from the 1923 silent comedy, Safety Last. The reason he’s hanging from this clocktower involves a convoluted tale of trying to make good in the big city, impress the true love he left back in Smalltown and make a quick bundle by scaling a 12-story building so that the fictional DeVore Department Store on the ground floor can generate some buzz and ideally move the merch — all that Horatio Alger stuff that doesn’t really change quite as much as it stays the same. The minute hand Harold’s holding onto over Broadway belongs to what is now the Sparkle Factory, owned by our good friend Tarina Tarantino, and stands across the street from the future Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. The marquee you see in Harry’s background is for the former Majestic Theatre. By all accounts, it lived up to its name until it was demolished in 1933. While it’s too bad the Majestic couldn’t make it to the present in its physical form, we’re glad Harold’s literal take on social climbing managed to stop the clock and preserve its memory forever.

We’re celebrating the ninetieth year since the American Magus and curator of the old, weird...

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:36:00 -0700

We’re celebrating the ninetieth year since the American Magus and curator of the old, weird America, Harry Smith, was born in Portland, Oregon, his amazing body of work and the impact of his vision — on those who knew him and the many more influenced by the legacy he left behind as revolutionary filmmaker, archivist, painter and alchemist. Harry Smith was a one-time resident of our predecessor, the Breslin Hotel, and his spirit still speaks to us, within these walls and everywhere we go.

On May 29 in the lobby, the Down Hill Strugglers keep alive the original underground sound made famous by his Anthology of American Folk Music.

DJ Ian Johnson of the Academy Records Radio show on East Village Radio plays roots, folk, country and blues.

We’ll have poetry readings and reflections by special guests and more. We’ll keep you apprised here and on the calendar.

Passionately devoted to contemporary art and artists, Dorothy...

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:52:57 -0700

Passionately devoted to contemporary art and artists, Dorothy and Herb Vogel—a New York City postal clerk and a librarian—began, in 1962, to build what would become a legendary art collection. They collected the art of their time and got to know the artists and their work, eventually bringing together some 5,000 artworks. In 1991, the Vogels donated most of their collection to the National Gallery in Washington. In addition, they selected 50 works for one museum in each of the 50 U.S. states. The Seattle Art Museum is the beneficiary in the state of Washington and will exhibit the Vogel gift in the spring of 2013, which will be contextualized by works from the museum’s collection.

– Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection : Fifty Works for Fifty States
Seattle Art Museum, Third Floor Galleries, through October 27, 2013

Coultrain - A Gem Iza Jewel

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:44:54 -0700

Coultrain - A Gem Iza Jewel

Of his many feats of daring, Harry Smith is likely most well...

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:13:00 -0700

Of his many feats of daring, Harry Smith is likely most well known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, an act of assemblage that threw back the gray flannel curtain of the fifties and offered a glimpse into a weirder America, inspiring a generation of songwriters and listeners. Here’s Charley Patton’s growl like the plea of a ravaged crop on ‘Mississippi Boweavil Blues.’ Uncle Dave Macon is unhinged if not ingenuous, pledging, “Won’t get drunk no more…” on ‘Way Down the Old Plank Road.’ The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers are ethereal, like ghosts trapped in wax. Here’s the fatalism and syncretic religion of an America where strange spirits roamed the land from the Dockery Plantation to Appalachia. This isn’t an America you can straitjacket into the fifties forever, not when conjurer Mister Smith reincarnates the armies of what we were. Upon accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammies, he said “I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music.” And so he did. Because he changed America with music. We’re celebrating the life of Harry Smith — a one-time resident of the building that has now become Ace Hotel New York — later this month on his ninetieth birthday, with music and readings by people who knew him and people he changed.

The songbook picture was lovingly defaced by Harry Smith.

The Usual is a local surf mag published in Montauk. Their latest...

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:02:00 -0700

The Usual is a local surf mag published in Montauk. Their latest issue is in partnership with Patagonia, leading up to their Bowery shop location opening early summer of this year. Keep an eye out.

Seattle-based Blackbird Ballard is camping out at the shop above...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:24:00 -0700

Seattle-based Blackbird Ballard is camping out at the shop above Rudy’s Barbershop next door to Ace Hotel New York until the first day of July. Stop in for incense pyres and friendly faces.

“In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand,...

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:07:00 -0700

“In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”

― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

Wojnarowicz’s journals have been digitized by the Fales Library at NYU. They, like he, are things of beauty.

discovershadow

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:50:11 -0700

discovershadow

Shoreditch, East London. Photo by Joost Schurr

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:57:34 -0700

Shoreditch, East London.

Photo by Joost Schurr

Photo

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:06:56 -0700

The pencil can be a mighty, mighty instrument. These fine...

Sun, 12 May 2013 07:00:24 -0700

The pencil can be a mighty, mighty instrument. These fine writing implements come clad in black in a troupe of ten, now on the shop. Sharpen and spellbind the page, scriveners!

The Self Evident Truths Project aka iO Tillett Wright visited...

Sat, 11 May 2013 07:00:19 -0700

The Self Evident Truths Project aka iO Tillett Wright visited Portland yesterday in the quest to photograph absolutely anyone and everyone who falls on the LGBTQ spectrum in any way. Here’s one now, beaming away. Follow them around the country and see if they’re stopping in your town soon.

The grand old families of Long Island — the Buchanans of...

Fri, 10 May 2013 14:22:00 -0700

The grand old families of Long Island — the Buchanans of ‘East Egg’ — and their disdain for the flamboyant nouveau riche of ‘West Egg’ are the kingpin of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As you’ll know if you’ve read the book, or if you see the Baz Luhrmann adaptation — for which he wrote the screenplay in a loft suite at Ace Hotel New York — premiering today, West Egg’s prince of thieves is represented by the Prohibition-era rumrunner with an inferiority complex and a broken heart of gold, Jay Gatsby. Why would generations of Americans below tycoon-status be so drawn to a story in some ways so remote from their own lives, dealing as it does with an obtuse schism between rival factions of the over-privileged? Likely, it’s due to Jay Gatsby’s humble origins, and the shame he felt about them, coupled with his unrequited love — both of which make him universally relatable. He’s a prototype for the conflicted American social climber, most eloquently expressed today in hip hop. We don’t begrudge him his excess because he feels like one of our own. And none of it — the fancy cars, the lavish parties, the jazz orchestras imported from Harlem — can salve the wounded soul of this striver anyway. His hopeless inner struggle humanizes him. Even after the robber barons of the Jazz Age drove the country off a cliff there was still a place in America’s heart for Jay Gatsby.

The Gatsbys and Buchanans of today’s West and East Egg are less nuanced. The rumrunner tycoons are all gone. They’ve been replaced by investment banks that bundle predatory loans and sell them to your grandparents’ pension funds, then short sell against those same loans, to make a killing when families get foreclosed on in Jamaica, Queens or Cleveland, Ohio, and your grandparents lose their life savings. You know the story well — its choose-your-own-misadventure variations are nearly endless.

In our Gilded Age, if you’re more than a few rungs up, there’s little or no social consequence for ethically dubious schemes, as there was for poor Gatsby’s rumrunning. When a Gatsby of 2013 gets busted, he settles for pennies on the dollar and celebrates by treating himself to a Picasso. Our East and West Eggers’ soirées still depend upon the fruits of creative labor. Without artists, the party would be a drag. Even acute protestations end up on the penthouse walls.

As Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby hits screens today, we’ll face an invitation to inquire into how history repeats itself — how are tensions between landed gentry and lottery winners, between philanthropists and studio-squatters, between the desire to be an object of envy and the deep human need to struggle toward our fantasies, ideals and visions — how are these the sheer force by which a developed and developing world orbits? We’re human, imperfect, compassionate, greedy, and full of yearning. It looks good on the big screen — it’s fucking beautiful. Good sugar with a bit of vinegar between the lines of the great American novel.

Lowell is our new favorite spot in Portland. Buy a trinket for...

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:53:00 -0700

Lowell is our new favorite spot in Portland. Buy a trinket for your altar and cloak your shoulders in a storied, kinesthetically-fulfilling textile from far yonder. Maya and Dino are the purveyors, curators and charmers at Lowell — stop in and see them some time.

Photographs by Laura Dart

BALTIMORE : ARABBER MURAL PROJECT

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:17:00 -0700

Gaia is a right-on dude who’s working with Mata Ruda, LNY and Nanook on this important mural project in Baltimore in support of the local arabber community. This project builds off of the mural produced by Gaia last fall for the arabbers on Fremont Avenue and will serve as a segue into transforming the yard into historic preservation site.

Arabbing as a practice began in the 19th century in Baltimore when easy access to stables and the shipyards of the inner harbor made selling fruit with horse drawn carriages an attainable entrepreneurial enterprise for African Americans in Baltimore. During the war effort and after WWII arabbing became an almost entirely African American trade. Competition from supermarkets and restrictions from modern zoning laws have endangered this heritage. Today there are only a couple sites left that serve as arabbing stables, with the Fremont Avenue location being one of the most prominent in the city. Today, arabbing serves as a viable living for a handful of men and their families whilst also serving a variety of communities including neighborhoods that do not have easy access to produce and whole foods.

Mata Ruda, Gaia, Nanook and LNY will use the story and experience of Baltimore’s fruit sellers to produce murals that will span the entirety of inside and exterior of the Fremont stables. The paintings are apart of a larger plan that will be implemented on behalf of the Arabber Preservation Society in the near future to make the site into a visitor center and provide the necessary renovations to the preexisting stable.

Kick down if you can to help them realize this project.

What modern sporting event can match the intensity, comradery...

Fri, 10 May 2013 06:00:33 -0700

What modern sporting event can match the intensity, comradery and balletic athletic prowess of the Puma Table Tennis Tournament aka PT3, matching New York’s fiercest topspin artists in the creative business? If there is one, we don’t know about it. To the Ace team — Migmar, Gorgo, Michelle — may your rackets anticipate your opponents’ every volley. We’re with you, today and always.

Abraham Lincolnhis hand and penhe will be good butgod knows...

Thu, 09 May 2013 07:00:19 -0700

Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good but
god knows When

Long before he was first endorsed for presidency this day in Decatur at the 1860 Illinois Republican State Convention, Abe Lincoln was penning verse in his sum book.

On this day in 1979, The Cure released its debut album Three...

Wed, 08 May 2013 17:26:40 -0700

On this day in 1979, The Cure released its debut album Three Imaginary Boys featuring “10.15 Saturday Night,” “Subway Song” and “Fire in Cairo.” It’s incredible that they traveled so far back from the future — their true time — in the time machine pictured above.