Police are looking for a Brooklyn man whose brutal attack on a tree with an axe horrified the internet. The Smoking Gun was at the site of the massacre earlier today and said that neighborhood residents ID’d the killer, as did the building owner who planted the 20 foot ginkgo a few years ago. He filed a police report. Although a cheapy bike attached to the tree was briefly stolen, the real motive appears to be straight up tree murder.
San Francisco artist Matthew Palladino paints dainty violence: bloody people tangled in spilled guts, tigers fighting police cars and Conflicted Gangsters. His newest hand-painted work looks like pixel art of neat hell: burning houses and suburban landscapes. Check out his classic, reversible bloods ‘n’ crips bandanna. Nifty? Matthew Palladino, “New Works,” Matthew Palladino, May 5 – Jun 11, Frederick and Freiser, NYC
Buju Banton’s defense attorney, David Oscar Markus, is asking the judge to reduce the 15 year mandatory minimum imposed on his client for a cocaine deal he had no money invested in and a gun that wasn’t his, calling it “way more than necessary” in documents filed with the court. The brief included “letters from actor, activist, and humanitarian Danny Glover, as well as from several of Banton’s 15 children,” reports the Jamaica Observer. The sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 23rd.
According to new research that shames Abu Dhabi and New York City alike, over the next three years, China will be putting up new skyscrapers at a rate of about six a month. The data compiled by Motian City, a Chinese tall building enthusiast website, forecasts the country having 800 skyscrapers in five years. In semi-related news, after almost a decade, a memorial at the World Trade Center onsisting of two reflecting pools and some trees, will be done in time for the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Errol Morris’s new documentary Tabloid explores the 1977 scandal of an obsessed beauty queen who stalked a young Mormon missionary, kidnapped him in the UK and cuffed him in a cabin. For three days, she proceeded with what she called “a honeymoon,” he called “rape” and later, the sexist courts called “Indecent Assault.” Read more »
As you may have heard, there was a shooting on a packed boardwalk at Brighton Beach Thursday evening, killing a teenage girl, wounding four men, and sending crowds of people running for cover. This recently uploaded YouTube video captured some of the chaos moments after shots rang out. Read more »
Are you talentless when it comes to making stencils? Are you less than handy with a spray can? Now, stenciling depressing statistics is easier than ever — no skill required. F.A.T. artists have designed this nifty kit with an adjustable pie chart splitter and rearrangeable letters, complete with instructions. Easy! Unless you also can’t spell or use tape.
Here’s the first ridiculous image of Sacha Baron Cohen as a character loosely based on Saddam Hussein in The Dictator. How loosely? That’s a Muammar Gaddafi suit, which gives Cohen a wider range of Muslim nations to indelicately mock. Inspired by Hussein’s “own” (ghostwritten) propaganda novel Zabibah and the King, the film dumps its poor-peasant-wife-Iraq raped by husband-USA metaphor. Instead, the dictator comes to New York to fall in love. Hilarity presumably ensues. Wait, wasn’t that Borat? See “the dictator” secretly replaced by a lookalike goat herder so he can emigrate and romance the perky, blond goof Anna Farris in theaters May 2012.
Graffiti writer and artist KATSU strategically hit up a roof next to the newly-opened section of the High Line. (Photo: Friends of the High Line/Streetsy)
For six whole weeks, pedestrians and cyclists are gonna have to share the Williamsburg Bridge’s north pathway while improvements are done to the south pathway and its temporarily closed.
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