Latest news with #TheSpirit
Time Out
02-05-2025
- Time Out
When is NYC's Cherry Walk path reopening in Riverside Park?
After months of delays and detours, the Hudson-side path in Riverside Park is back—repaved, re-striped and ready for spring strolls. The wait is finally over: Cherry Walk, the beloved 1.25-mile stretch of the Hudson River Greenway between West 100th and 125th Streets in Riverside Park, is officially reopening this weekend after an eight-month-long closure—and just in time for the tail end of cherry blossom season. Closed since last September, the scenic riverside route underwent a long-overdue makeover, including repaving areas damaged by tree roots and adding new, clearly marked lanes to better separate cyclists from pedestrians. For months, park-goers were forced to detour from the water and climb stairs just to keep moving uptown, an annoying reroute that left walkers, bikers and runners grumbling. 'I used to train for marathons there,' cyclist Marteen Vandersman told The Spirit, the first outlet to report on the reopening. 'It's the best place for it.' Originally slated to reopen mid-April, Cherry Walk's return was delayed by final safety inspections and finishing touches on the lane markings. With little communication from the city, residents grew frustrated. 'It's frustrating because it's been closed for so long,' one West Side walker told the neighborhood publication. 'When we see it from above, it looks done.' Despite the hiccups, the reopening brings renewed access to one of Manhattan's most peaceful pockets—a riverside respite where the breeze cuts through city noise and, yes, the cherry trees bloom in springtime glory. The trees, gifted to the city in 1912 by the Committee of Japanese Residents, are a key reason Cherry Walk made our list of the best places to see cherry blossoms in NYC. With the path's upgrade, the city promises a safer, more user-friendly experience without losing the historic charm that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux envisioned. Cherry Walk is back—and we couldn't be happier about it. Why was Cherry Walk closed? The path was closed in September 2024 for repaving and safety upgrades. Tree roots had damaged the pavement, and the city aimed to improve accessibility by adding new lane markings to separate cyclists and pedestrians. When does Cherry Walk reopen? Cherry Walk is expected to reopen the weekend of May 3, 2025, following final inspections and completion of all pavement markings.
South Wales Argus
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South Wales Argus
Things to do in Gwent this weekend
Seven Wonders: The Spirit of Fleetwood Mac at the Blackwood Miners' Institute On Saturday, April 26, the Blackwood Miners' Institute will host Seven Wonders: The Spirit of Fleetwood Mac at 7:30pm. This seven-piece band pays tribute to Fleetwood Mac, covering all eras of the band's music. Attendees can expect to hear classics such as Go Your Own Way, The Chain, and Dreams. Tickets for the event are priced at £25. The band has been praised as "the best tribute" and promises an evening of singing and dancing for all Fleetwood Mac fans. 150th anniversary of the Victorian refurbishment of St Cadoc's Church in Llangattock-Vibon-Avel Also on April 26, and on Sunday, April 27, the 150th anniversary of the Victorian refurbishment of St Cadoc's Church in Llangattock-Vibon-Avel will be celebrated. Visitors can drop in between 9am and 5pm to explore the church's history and see the restoration work on the pipe organ. The church is home to stained glass by three Victorian makers and the burial place of C.S. Rolls, the founder of Rolls Royce. Visitors are encouraged to bring music to play on the organ, with no prior experience required. April Taproom Party at the Hive Mind Mead & Brew Co On April 26, an April Taproom Party will be held at the Hive Mind Mead & Brew Co. The event will feature a performance by Velvet Man God and food by Welsh burger legends Hills Brecon. The party will start at 5.30pm, with food served from 6pm and music from 7.45pm. Entry is free, but attendees are asked to book a ticket to ensure enough food is prepared. Six Mile Race and Junior One Mile Run at Parc Bryn Bach On Sunday, April 27, the Hospice of the Valleys Six Mile Race and Junior One Mile Run will take place at Parc Bryn Bach. The event is open to runners of all abilities, with the six-mile race open to those aged 17 and over, and the one-mile run for children aged 4 to 16. The race will take place in the scenic grounds of Parc Bryn Bach. Classic car show at Chepstow Racecourse Also on April 27, the Chepstow Classic Car Show will be held at Chepstow Racecourse. The event will run from 10am to 3pm and will feature a range of vintage cars, as well as an auto jumble and collector's fair. Public admission is £5, with free entry for those under 16 when accompanied by an adult. Classic car owners can book their cars into the show for free.
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time
I use the word comix to describe my art form not as a misspelling of comics, which would stress the medium's roots in the 19th-century newspaper funnies, and only in passing reference to the 'underground comix' of the 1960s, whose name pointed to their X-rated 'adult' content. I think of the word as co-mix, and lose the hyphen to focus on the fusion of two separate mediums of expression—words and pictures—into one. It's a mongrel art—a mutt!—and every great master of comix must find a new way to use the distinct skills of writing and drawing to create a new way of transforming time into space. One very short strip by Jules Feiffer helped me understand the full implications of what that meant. In his astonishingly varied career, Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95, made his mark as a screenwriter, a playwright, an author, an illustrator, and more, but his work as a comix artist was at the core. Like the other great masters of co-mixing, he expanded what was possible in our medium, and was a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore. Feiffer got his first job as a 17-year-old assistant to the great Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, a weekly newspaper supplement about a masked crimefighter in a sophisticated film noir–like world. Over the next 10 years, Feiffer sharpened his talents and submitted work to book publishers and newspaper syndicates that seemed to like what he did but had no idea how to sell it. Then, in 1956, he walked into the offices of the fledgling Village Voice, which had just started up the year before, and was invited to do the first alternative-weekly comic strip. Two generations of artists (Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, David Lynch, and so many more) would follow a similar path through the alt-weeklies. Feiffer did his Voice strips for more than 40 years (with no pay for the first eight!). The paper gave him space to hone his style and themes, as well as time to find an audience eager for something that was not like anything else. His skills as a draftsman were rather modest in his early years, but from the get-go, he showed a formidable talent for dialogue. He was an astute political satirist and a perceptive analyst of the human condition. Well versed in the Freudian thought that permeated 1950s America, Feiffer and Charles Schulz (the creator of Peanuts) were arguably the first cartoonists to give their characters inner lives. Schulz portrayed his Peanuts gang as small adults; Feiffer's adults are all neurotic overgrown children. Charlie Brown is a hapless loser, and Bernard Mergendeiler, one of Feiffer's recurring characters, is a hopeless schlemiel—a grown-up, Jewish Charlie Brown. Both artists were sensitive barometers of their times. [Read: My friend Jules Feiffer] Feiffer's strip was unique—until other cartoonists 'borrowed' his approach. He generally steered clear of dialogue balloons and panel borders. His scratchy lines were influenced by Saul Steinberg and William Steig, and indicated that he was hip to Picasso, Paul Klee, and George Grosz, as well as to his childhood-favorite old masters—including Elzie Segar (Popeye), Crockett Johnson (Barnaby), and his beloved mentor, Eisner. He knew the kinetic language of comix intimately, but most of the work that made him famous was remarkably static—the same face or figure repeated with minor variations over all six to eight panels. 'I thought that for the work to be effective, the movement had to be very subtle or nonexistent. I had to sneak up on the reader … so I had to have a frozen camera,' he explained in an interview. 'And most important to me was the storytelling, that the flow had to be very smooth.' The static figures act like a metronome, marking time between the stanzas of his sharp-witted soliloquies and dialogues; the gestures and expressions function as stage directions. This strategy worked for him for about 10 years—and then began to bore him silly. Feiffer would regularly let his angst-ridden modern dancer (a character based on an old girlfriend) hijack a whole strip, and she'd leap gracefully through all the panels, offering a Dance to Variety. Eventually, the artist broke out of his self-imposed prison, letting his lines and figures become jazzier, often drawing directly in ink without any preliminary penciling. In 1958, Playboy offered him space to spread his wings, to work in color and occasionally do multipage features such as Hostileman, about a deeply neurotic superhero drawn in the flashy comic-book layouts that Feiffer had devoured as a kid. As time went on, Feiffer became more and more graphically daring, and in 1979, he even drew a graphic novel avant la lettre, Tantrum—'a novel-in-cartoons,' per the jacket copy, about a middle-aged man literally turning back the clock to avoid adult responsibilities and become a toddler again. Notably, the passing of time became a recurring subject in Feiffer's long and fruitful career. He wasn't just a master of turning time into space; he was the grand master of comix timing. One classic example of this is his minimalist tour de force, Oh God! It is, in one sense, sexually explicit for the time it was published, but also completely abstract—just a series of black boxes, perhaps in a variation on blackout comedy sketches is a master class in the formal potentials of co-mixing words and pictures, and it made an indelible impression on me. Borders, which Feiffer so rarely used, were essential here. The spaces between each panel clearly demarcate one moment in time from the next. The lettering is in Feiffer's distinctive hand, made with the same strokes he uses for his drawings—his writing and drawing are extensions of each other. In the first four boxes on page one, Bernard and Joyce are each reduced to a straight line, a minimalist abstraction of the speech-balloon tails that usually point to characters' mouths. Their two blocks of dialogue in the first panel thrust down at steep angles that will converge somewhere below the panel border. The text gets smaller and quieter in the next three panels, followed by three extraordinary solid panels of inky blackness. Silence settles in after the intense activity above. On the left side of the last panel on the first page, Bernard asks after Joyce in 'normal'-size lettering. But the entire right half of that last panel on page one remains black—one more half-beat of stillness. [Read: A high-water mark in American mass culture] Dialogue resumes on the first tier of page two, interrupted by only one panel of blackness. I asked Feiffer about those panels once: 'Why three boxes first and only one on the second page?' He paused, did a sort of Fred Astaire–style soft-shoe step, and said, 'Well, as Jack Benny once said, 'In comedy, timing is everything.'' In the panel following that single black box, Joyce and Bernard's affectionate dialogue continues. In the next row, Bernard declares his love for Joyce, and a curtain of black silence shrouds her side of the panel. This is followed by a direct repeat of the last box on page one—'Joyce?'—and another silence. And in the last panel of the comic, Bernard's half is silent as Joyce delivers her punch line. Oh God. How beautifully choreographed! When the master of timing departed our temporal world for a large and silent india-ink panel nine days shy of his 96th birthday, the cartoonist left behind an enormous body of work that still dances on the page. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time
I use the word comix to describe my art form not as a misspelling of comics, which would stress the medium's roots in the 19th-century newspaper funnies, and only in passing reference to the ' underground comix ' of the 1960s, whose name pointed to their X-rated 'adult' content. I think of the word as co-mix, and lose the hyphen to focus on the fusion of two separate mediums of expression—words and pictures—into one. It's a mongrel art—a mutt!—and every great master of comix must find a new way to use the distinct skills of writing and drawing to create a new way of transforming time into space. One very short strip by Jules Feiffer helped me understand the full implications of what that meant. In his astonishingly varied career, Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95, made his mark as a screenwriter, a playwright, an author, an illustrator, and more, but his work as a comix artist was at the core. Like the other great masters of co-mixing, he expanded what was possible in our medium, and was a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore. Feiffer got his first job as a 17-year-old assistant to the great Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, a weekly newspaper supplement about a masked crimefighter in a sophisticated film noir–like world. Over the next 10 years, Feiffer sharpened his talents and submitted work to book publishers and newspaper syndicates that seemed to like what he did but had no idea how to sell it. Then, in 1956, he walked into the offices of the fledgling Village Voice, which had just started up the year before, and was invited to do the first alternative-weekly comic strip. Two generations of artists (Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, David Lynch, and so many more) would follow a similar path through the alt-weeklies. Feiffer did his Voice strips for more than 40 years (with no pay for the first eight!). The paper gave him space to hone his style and themes, as well as time to find an audience eager for something that was not like anything else. His skills as a draftsman were rather modest in his early years, but from the get-go, he showed a formidable talent for dialogue. He was an astute political satirist and a perceptive analyst of the human condition. Well versed in the Freudian thought that permeated 1950s America, Feiffer and Charles Schulz (the creator of Peanuts) were arguably the first cartoonists to give their characters inner lives. Schulz portrayed his Peanuts gang as small adults; Feiffer's adults are all neurotic overgrown children. Charlie Brown is a hapless loser, and Bernard Mergendeiler, one of Feiffer's recurring characters, is a hopeless schlemiel—a grown-up, Jewish Charlie Brown. Both artists were sensitive barometers of their times. Feiffer's strip was unique—until other cartoonists 'borrowed' his approach. He generally steered clear of dialogue balloons and panel borders. His scratchy lines were influenced by Saul Steinberg and William Steig, and indicated that he was hip to Picasso, Paul Klee, and George Grosz, as well as to his childhood-favorite old masters—including Elzie Segar (Popeye), Crockett Johnson (Barnaby), and his beloved mentor, Eisner. He knew the kinetic language of comix intimately, but most of the work that made him famous was remarkably static—the same face or figure repeated with minor variations over all six to eight panels. 'I thought that for the work to be effective, the movement had to be very subtle or nonexistent. I had to sneak up on the reader … so I had to have a frozen camera,' he explained in an interview. 'And most important to me was the storytelling, that the flow had to be very smooth.' The static figures act like a metronome, marking time between the stanzas of his sharp-witted soliloquies and dialogues; the gestures and expressions function as stage directions. This strategy worked for him for about 10 years—and then began to bore him silly. Feiffer would regularly let his angst-ridden modern dancer (a character based on an old girlfriend) hijack a whole strip, and she'd leap gracefully through all the panels, offering a Dance to Variety. Eventually, the artist broke out of his self-imposed prison, letting his lines and figures become jazzier, often drawing directly in ink without any preliminary penciling. In 1958, Playboy offered him space to spread his wings, to work in color and occasionally do multipage features such as Hostileman, about a deeply neurotic superhero drawn in the flashy comic-book layouts that Feiffer had devoured as a kid. As time went on, Feiffer became more and more graphically daring, and in 1979, he even drew a graphic novel avant la lettre, Tantrum —'a novel-in-cartoons,' per the jacket copy, about a middle-aged man literally turning back the clock to avoid adult responsibilities and become a toddler again. Notably, the passing of time became a recurring subject in Feiffer's long and fruitful career. He wasn't just a master of turning time into space; he was the grand master of comix timing. One classic example of this is his minimalist tour de force, Oh God! It is, in one sense, sexually explicit for the time it was published, but also completely abstract—just a series of black boxes, perhaps in a variation on blackout comedy sketches is a master class in the formal potentials of co-mixing words and pictures, and it made an indelible impression on me. Borders, which Feiffer so rarely used, were essential here. The spaces between each panel clearly demarcate one moment in time from the next. The lettering is in Feiffer's distinctive hand, made with the same strokes he uses for his drawings—his writing and drawing are extensions of each other. In the first four boxes on page one, Bernard and Joyce are each reduced to a straight line, a minimalist abstraction of the speech-balloon tails that usually point to characters' mouths. Their two blocks of dialogue in the first panel thrust down at steep angles that will converge somewhere below the panel border. The text gets smaller and quieter in the next three panels, followed by three extraordinary solid panels of inky blackness. Silence settles in after the intense activity above. On the left side of the last panel on the first page, Bernard asks after Joyce in 'normal'-size lettering. But the entire right half of that last panel on page one remains black—one more half-beat of stillness. Dialogue resumes on the first tier of page two, interrupted by only one panel of blackness. I asked Feiffer about those panels once: 'Why three boxes first and only one on the second page?' He paused, did a sort of Fred Astaire–style soft-shoe step, and said, 'Well, as Jack Benny once said, 'In comedy, timing is everything.'' In the panel following that single black box, Joyce and Bernard's affectionate dialogue continues. In the next row, Bernard declares his love for Joyce, and a curtain of black silence shrouds her side of the panel. This is followed by a direct repeat of the last box on page one—'Joyce?'—and another silence. And in the last panel of the comic, Bernard's half is silent as Joyce delivers her punch line. Oh God. How beautifully choreographed! When the master of timing departed our temporal world for a large and silent india-ink panel nine days shy of his 96th birthday, the cartoonist left behind an enormous body of work that still dances on the page.
