The New York Observer

He may be an heir to the Coors brewing family, but Colorado congressional candidate Joe Coors is not actually a glass of cool, refreshing beer. In case anyone was confused about this, Mr. Coors makes the distinction crystal clear in his first campaign commercial.

“I’m Joe Coors, I’m not a beer and I approve this message,” Mr. Coors says at the end of his ad.

To make the contrast completely clear and visually illustrate the difference between himself and beer, Mr. Coors appears in the ad standing next to a giant-sized frothy glass of brew. Read More

Last night, Congressman Charlie Rangel and his challengers spoke at the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club in the Bronx, where, after making their pitches, the club voted 54-13 to endorse State Senator Adriano Espaillat for the seat. While the result wasn’t earth-shattering, it was notable that Mr. Rangel attended at all — he has not been known to attend contested club endorsement meetings in the past.

While the Benjamin Franklin club is fairly influential, Mr. Rangel has recently rolled out his own set of big-name endorsements, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Speaker Christine Quinn and former Mayor Ed Koch. Former Mayor David Dinkins is also expected to back Mr. Rangel. Read More

If you walk the High Line park at night, you’ll see emus, elephants and psychedelic monkeys in mid-swing, all aglow. And this is without the use of hallucinogens. A group of artists including Sun Bae, Stuart Braunstein and Jordan Betten have transformed a Chelsea rooftop, between West 27th and 28th Streets, into a glowing sculpture garden with sound and video. Read More

The Museum of Modern Art is turning out to be quite the poetry patron these days. First, as part of their “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language” exhibition, MoMA installed John Giorno’s 1969 piece, Dial-a-Poem, in which a telephone plays back recordings of poets reading from their work (it’s also available on their web site). Now, the museum is celebrating its former employee, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, Frank O’Hara, who worked as an assistant curator at MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture and wrote many canonical works during his lunch breaks. Read More

The poet Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone is retitled Antigonick (New Directions, 180 pp., $24.95), as in “nick of time,” suggesting that the play is all about timing. This is Ms. Carson’s first book since 2010’s Nox, a kind of scrapbook-as-poem that she calls an “epitaph” to her estranged brother who died in 2000. Antigone, the final installment of Sophocles’ trilogy of so-called Theban works (though it is widely considered to have been composed before Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus), also takes the death of a brother—more specifically his burial—as its jumping off point. This translation, which also includes illustrations by Bianca Stone, is less focused on the tragedies that befall a family than it is on the perfectly timed events that lead to them. To emphasize this, Ms. Carson, a professor of ancient Greek, writes in an extra character named Nick, a pun on the book’s title. Nick never speaks. “He measures things” is his only stage direction, but he remains onstage even after the rest of the characters have left, still measuring. Read More

Peinture (Étoile Bleue), a 1927 painting by Joan Miró will lead Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in London on June 19, 2012. The painting, set against a brilliant azure background, is part of his “dream paintings” cycle, a series of works created at the height of his engagement with the Surrealist movement. Other examples are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Read More

Becoming a socialite is a grueling slog even in the best of circumstances. And I’m not in the best of circumstances. I don’t really know anyone or have any money, and while I’ve gotten plenty of ink over the years, it’s not the kind on the society pages (it’s on my shoulders, calves, upper arms, forearms…).

But nobody does it alone. Cinderella had a Fairy Godmother and a bunch of little birds. I had an editor, a stylist and a photographer lending occasional advice, but it wasn’t enough. I needed a publicist. And I knew of only one man for the job: R. Couri Hay. Read More