Gladly gives ‘gay rage’:
Activist John Penley has been busy organizing events for Occupy Wall Street, from the Joan Baez concert down at Foley Square on Veterans Day to the raucous drum circle up near Mayor Bloomberg’s house on Sunday. But in a flashback to his earlier career as a news photographer, Penley said he recently got a call from people making a new movie on Ed Koch, asking for permission to use his photo of the former mayor striding through a sea of angry Act Up protesters. The photo ran on the New York Post’s front page under the headline “Gay Rage,” and is one of Penley’s all-time favorite shots, so he was more than happy to let them use it. Other than confirming that there is indeed a film, Koch revealed few details. “Yes, there is a movie, to be shown in January-February,” Hizzoner told us, adding, “I will discuss it at that time.” The big question is will Koch review this one, and will he give it a plus or a minus?
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East Village blog EV Grieve recently had an update on the suspected garage at the Economakis “mass-eviction” mansion at 47 E. Third St. We ourselves had received a tip earlier this year from a former tenant of the building who told us a highly coveted curb cut had been approved for the sidewalk in front; the former tenant — who, like the other holdouts, eventually took a buyout to leave — noted it’s very difficult to get approval for a curb cut, yet somehow the Economakises managed to wrangle one. Every time we pass down the block, we’ve been checking to see if the curb cut has been installed, but it still isn’t there. Anyway, some months ago, we called Alistair Economakis to ask him about the purported curb cut and garage that people have been alleging he’s putting in. He said he couldn’t really talk about it. So, we tried e-mailing him instead, and he sent back the following response: “[Scoopy], Thank you for your e-mail and for reaching out, I hope all is well. Regarding the questions from my neighbors, I have to say that I enjoy meeting my neighbors and speaking to them in person. In fact, I have done so on many an occasion. If my neighbors have questions they are always free to introduce themselves and I would be happy to speak with them in person. However, at this point in time, I would prefer to move beyond discussing my home in the media. Sincerely, Alistair.” So maybe — who knows? — if someone just goes up to him and asks him if he’s putting in the garage, all this confusion will finally be answered. We saw Alistair on the sidewalk a few weeks ago, talking to a man in a business suit. However, before we could go over and ask about the garage, they both ducked inside the basement-level space on the other side of the stoop. It basically looked like Economakis was showing the space to a potential tenant. This summer a meditation poster was pasted on the plywood fence covering the alleged garage, and someone had written “Hare Krsna” under the Economakises’ mailbox, which is also on this plywood fence. So, at that point, we were wondering if the “garage” was in fact a new Hare Krishna temple — or maybe just a ginormous mailbox.
D.G.’s word to Q.H.A.:
Assemblymember Deborah Glick tells us that leaders of the Queer History Alliance recently met with her to talk about getting access to the basement under the open-space triangle where Rudin Management plans to build a park for the community, at 12th St. and Seventh Ave. Glick said she instead proposed a new idea to Q.H.A.: that they try to use empty space in the former St. Vincent’s O’Toole Building for their planned learning center on the AIDS crisis and its heroes, like St. Vincent’s Hospital. An AIDS memorial could still be located in the new community park, Glick said, but “with an entrance across from the park, the learning center would be visible.” On the other hand, she said, “Underground space is perhaps a little reminiscent of a burial.”
One-woman wow!
We caught an amazing performance by Heather Harpham in “Happiness” at Theatre 80 St. Mark’s on Friday evening. Her autobiographical piece about caring for a daughter with bone cancer was part of the “All for One” theater festival there, a weeklong series of one-person shows that wrapped up last weekend. A former East Villager, Harpham used to live at Fifth St. and Avenue A. The performance continued afterward, as Theatre 80 impresario Lorcan Otway jauntily played first his Irish flute and then drum while dispensing the Tallisker whiskey and absinthe — the latter which apparently won’t actually rot your brain and drive you crazy. (That was reportedly just the misleading hype by the French wine lobby back in the days of Rimbaud and “Le Bateau Ivre.”)
