At 9:30 PM EST exactly 33 years ago, New York City’s five boroughs suffered a massive power outage that changed plenty about the United States and the Western World. It took a little more than 24 hours for the ’77 blackout to end, but not before 1,616 stores were damaged in looting and rioting, 1,037 fires were responded to, and 3,776 people were arrested. The event and its effects are still under study at places like George Mason University in Virginia.

Here are Grandmaster Caz, Disco Wiz, KRS One, Annie Sprinkle and others reminiscing from the street perspective…
 

 
…and below, leave it to the BBC to credit post-welfare-state neo-liberalism for saving the Big Apple:
 

 
Word from a Fab Five Freddy tweet and a post on his own MySpace blog is that New York hip-hop futurist Rammellzee has passed away at age 50 from as-yet-unrevealed causes. (@149st features a great, fact-filled interview with the man.) Emerging as a teen graffiti artist in the mid-‘70s, bombing the A-train from its last stop in his Far Rockaway, Queens hometown, Rammell ended up like many of his talented peers—a multidisciplinary creative icon submerged in the nascent metropolitan hip-hop scene.  He first surfaced as a persona to the world in amazing fashion, dressed in trenchcoat and wielding a sawed-off shotgun as he MC’ed for the Rock Steady Crew in the Amphitheatre scene of hip-hop’s famous first film, 1982’s Wild Style.
 

 
This is recent New York Times article is awesome for so many reasons. I used to live a block away from the Stonewall Bar for a number of years and I never saw a single superhero walking in or out of the place. Then again, Clark Kent could have changed into his Superman duds after he was amongst his super friends?

Dim lighting. Rendezvous-friendly nooks. Muscled bartenders. Pulsating dance music. At first glance, it could be any Saturday night in any gay bar in New York.

But then you notice, off to one corner, Superman flirting with Green Lantern. And there, across the room, someone in the form-fitting outfit of Black Adam, Captain Marvel’s foe, determinedly working the floor. In fact, there seems to be an inordinate number of men here tonight who look as if they have all but jumped from the pages of a comic book. And in some way, they have.

This is Skin Tight U.S.A., the occasional costume-fetish party held at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, which draws a regular group of men (and their admirers) who enjoy a special kind of dress-up. Some wear heroic outfits; some, wrestling gear. The crowd can range from 25 people on an average night to 250 on a spectacular one. The common thread is that the muscle-cuddling garb often leaves little to the imagination.

“I was always attracted to the superhero physique,” said Matthew Levine, 31, who helped found the party in 2005 with Andrew Owen, 44, and who was one of the few participants willing to be named. The two become friends as, respectively, the graphic designer and Webmaster for Hard Comixxx, a predecessor of Skin Tight, once held at the Eagle bar in Chelsea. Mr. Levine is a big fan of the X-Men (who have a handful of gay characters) and the Transformers (all of whom seem straight) and has been reading comics since he was 8. “As I got older,” he said, “I realized, ‘Oh, this is why I admire the Grecian ideal of manhood and musculature.’

Out of the Closet and Up Up and Away (New York Times)

Thank you Alexandra Le Tellier!

 
British artist—and “human camera”—Stephen Wiltshire has set about drawing a 20-ft. long panorama of New York City’s skyline.  What’s astounding about this, though, is that Wiltshire, who has autism, has seen the city just once—during a 20-minute helicopter ride.  He’s sketching it entirely from memory.  You can watch a bit of Wiltshire’s process, and progress, below:

 
In the NYT: Like A Skyline Is Etched In His Head

(via New York Magazine)

This interesting online portfolio of disappearing New York City storefronts by James and Karla Murray from their book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, really struck a chord with me. The NYC that I used to love disappeared a long time ago. By 1990 I was already feeling like I was walking past the ghosts of all my favorite bookstores, record stores, nightclubs, etc. By 2007, I’d had it with New York—for good—and we moved—quite happily—back to Los Angeles. These photographs made me wistful about the city of my youth and the below video of The Kills has the perfect soundtrack for looking at these fast disappearing reminders of what New York used to be…

The Disappearing Face of New York

Thanks Steven Otero!