"
I know you are out there, just wanting to put your wig on, just like me. And I know you're just waiting to have a good time. Just put a little ball earring on, a little bad sunglasses, and a big, bad wig on, 'cause it's good. It feels good, works, it does." It is, or was,
Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival held in NYC, starting in 1985 by
"Lady" Bunny and friends. Each year
the party grew, moving to
Union Square in 1991, then
to Christopher Street waterfront in 1994 to deal with the expanding crowd.
2001 was supposed to be the last year, but
the party came back in 2003,
in conjunction with the annual HOWL festival. That carried the tradition on for another two years, and
Wigstock's official website is stuck in 2005, a reminder of the festivities that were. You can
reminisce with Gawker, or take a short journey back to 1987 with
Wigstock: The Movie (part 1 of 4), not to be confused with the longer film of the same name,
capturing Wigstock 1995 (part 1 of 8).
posted by filthy light thief
on Mar 9, 2012 -
18 comments
A Year of New York in 5 minutes. Cameraman Andrew Clancy lives in New York City, and was in the habit of shooting footage of what was going on around him whenever he was out. This is a compilation of life in the city, from the point of view of a New Yorker.
posted by Phire
on Nov 7, 2011 -
21 comments
The Coolest Locksmith Shop in New York City "From a distance, it looks like a bunch of golden squiggles and spirals have been added, snaking whimsically across the facade. But get a little closer and you’ll find the real magic… The new design is made up entirely of keys, literally thousands, and thousands, and thousands of keys, twisting into wonderful assortment of swoops and twirls."
posted by ocherdraco
on Feb 8, 2011 -
45 comments
Tourist Lanes & New Yorker Lanes
One afternoon, field agents of Improv Everywhere "...created separate walking lanes for tourists and New Yorkers on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. Department of Transportation 'employees' were on hand to enforce the new rules and ask pedestrians for their feedback on the initiative."
posted by ShawnStruck
on Aug 3, 2010 -
72 comments
As They Say is a 20+ minute musical composition by Icelander
Ólöf Arnalds, where she plays and sings all the parts herself in nine-fold splitscreen. She created the piece from interviews with 17 New Yorkers, each of a different nationality, and she sings in all 17 languages. Other Ólöf Arnalds videos:
11 minute documentary,
4 songs live on KEXP,
covering That Lucky Old Sun,
original song that morphs into Springsteen's I'm on Fire live,
new song,
an interview broken up into 17 chunks and a
10 minute documentary. The interview, the first of the documentaries and
some songs are in English.
[Ólöf Arnalds previously on MeFi]
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 9, 2010 -
4 comments
The Real Good Chair Experiment - What happens if you leave 25 chairs around New York and watch to see where they go? The short film then continues with an interview with a few of the people who brought them home.
posted by flatluigi
on Jan 8, 2010 -
27 comments
Voting has now closed in the
NYC BigApps Challenge, a $20,000 contest to produce amusing, interesting, or even useful apps using the information in the
NYC DataMine.
Browse the eligible submissions here. Some highlights:
Taxihack: collects e-mailed and tweeted comments on NYC cabs, by medallion or license number.
Clean.ly: Did the restaurant across the street pass its last health inspection?
Walkshed: You tell Walkshed what kind of amenities you'd like to be within walking distance of, and the app makes you a heat map showing your most walkable neighborhoods.
SmartPark: Locates nearby garages and collects social information about available street parking. Buzzes you when it's time to move your car.
Trees Near You: Does what it says on the box.
(via
Indirect Collaboration.)
posted by escabeche
on Jan 8, 2010 -
13 comments
Like old cheese and vomit, mixed with dog food ... Halitosis and aged cabbage ... Rank Swiss cheese ... Sour milk ... Pee in the air every day ... Like an open corpse ... Like a musty homeless person decomposing in musky homeless person urine ... Caramel with a slight undertone of mildly rank underarm ... Rodenticide. It's Gawker's
New York City Subway Smell Map.
posted by Urban Hermit
on Sep 26, 2006 -
17 comments
A long-lost treasure too toxic to touch: Construction at New York City's Harlem Community Justice Center recently revealed a room piled high with records documenting the building's former life as an early 20th century prison. They offer a peek into the street life of ca. 1900 NYC and scholars are already interested - there's only one problem: the room also contains decades worth of toxic pigeon droppings. (NY Times - registration required).
Photos (click on the "records rescue" link at the bottom) of the room are available at the great correctionhistory.org which also offers histories and photos of other out-of-the-way corners of NYC like the Hart Island Potter's Field.
posted by ryanshepard
on Nov 5, 2004 -
9 comments
The Triangle Factory Fire of 1911. 'This site includes selected information on a terrible and unnecessary tragedy involving the death of many young working women in a New York City sweatshop at the beginning of the 20th century and the resulting investigations and reforms. '
posted by plep
on Jul 22, 2004 -
7 comments
Love on the Quiet.
One breezy evening a few months ago, 19-year-old Joseph Briggs did something he had never before dared to do growing up gay in New York: he held hands with and kissed his boyfriend in his own neighborhood... While New York is legendary as a place where gays and lesbians can live openly and free from prejudice, Mr. Briggs's story reveals a great deal about what might be called the other gay New York. Life in this New York unfolds far from the chiseled Chelsea boys, funky Village bars and relatively gay-friendly neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and Park Slope, Brooklyn, that represent the public image of gay life in the city. In the farther reaches of the boroughs outside Manhattan, gay life is often harder and nearly always more complicated. In these neighborhoods, the national debate over gay marriage can be much less important than the search for a doctor who does not squirm when talking about homosexual sex. And here is your
NYC Gay And Lesbian Population Distribution--a handy, color-coded map in
pdf format, which comes from
The Gay And Lesbian Atlas to provide more snapshots of life as lived, block by block, butterfly wing by butterfly wing, hometown and homeboy, in a time of more cultural
evolution than, say, revolution.
posted by y2karl
on Jul 18, 2004 -
22 comments
Li'l G n' R - the first ever Guns N' Roses Kids Tribute Band. Check the audition video
here (quicktime). They're playing CBGB's in a couple of weeks. Only $5, c'mon NYC MeFi'ers....one of you has to go and report.
posted by Ufez Jones
on Feb 4, 2004 -
20 comments
