If there were any doubt that burlesque is making a comeback in New York City, its presence at the Plaza Hotel likely ends it, suggests Pia Catton in the Wall Street Journal (8/2/10). No less a venue than the Plaza's Oak Room is the unlikely setting for The Sophisticates, described by its host, Abe Goldfarb, as "a pretty classic burlesque revue." The dancers keep things relatively clean, and perform "amidst the club's tables, making eye contact or ... tossing gloves to the seated patrons."

According to Abe, this is the way burlesque used to be done. "It gives the opportunity for a floor show," he says. "In the old films that deal with burlesque, the performers are on the floor level. It was more flirtatious." The Sophisticates is a "two-act show" that originally was supposed to be monthly, but because of popular demand, it's now bi-weekly. Other venues include the Slipper Room, which is currently closed for renovation, and Coney Island USA.

James Habacker of the Slipper Room says burlesque has its roots in serious matters that attract serious people. "It's political satire first and foremost," says James, whose act involves "a top-hat-and-cane vaudeville character with hilarious timing." He adds: "It's people who are more interested in art than landing a role in a TV show... I'm old enough to remember when there was some really amazing experimental theater going on. The burlesque scene has a foothold in that."

Penny Starr Jr. is combining her love for sci-fi with her genetic predisposition for burlesque to create her own brand of performance art, reports David Moye on AOL News (7/30/10). Penny grew up watching sci-fi films with her parents, and her grandmother, Penny Starr Sr., who was a burlesque star in the '50s and '60s. For a while, Penny Jr. was into "feminist performance" art but she got the idea to follow in her grandma's dancesteps after making "a documentary on the Velvet Hammer, a modern-day burlesque troupe."

"I think of myself as a nerd first," says Penny,"then a filmmaker; and finally, a dancer. All of these things fuel each other." She observes that burlesque archetypes aren't all that different from, say, Princess Leia (video). "After all," she says. "Star Trek and Star Wars are just modern-day equivalents of the myths of the Norse Gods." Penny likes to think of what she's doing as a sophisticated art form, but admits that her audience might not.

"The audience doesn't care about the art," she says. "They just want to see their favorite sci-fi pin-ups take their clothes off." Nor does she see it as a big moneymaker, necessarily, but she does see it as a way to remind people "of what burlesque originally was," before the comics and the dancers parted ways. "No one's making enough money here that we have to appeal to the lowest common denominator," says Penny, adding: "That said, Star Trek is pretty popular." In addition to live performances, Penny is also about to release a DVD, "Supernova A Go-Go Sci-Fi Burlesque Show."

A pop-up retail workshop in San Francisco is part of Levi's "Go Forth - Ready To Work" marketing campaign (video), reports Laura Compton in the San Francisco Chronicle (7/4/10). The eight-week event involves outfitting a 3,000 square-foot retail space on Valencia Street into "a fully functional, albeit temporary, print shop filled with heavy equipment, salvaged work tables, type cases, ink and other essentials of an age-old art." (images).

Levi's Workshop San Francisco, as it is known, features various "local writers, artists and creative types," and "will produce a range of printed matter, such as books, posters, and T-Shirts." All proceeds from the sale of goods produced at the store will go to three local non-profit organizations: Women's Building, Southern Exposure and Plaza Adelante. Zach Augustine of Winston, a retail consulting firm, says the Levi's Workshop fills a gap left by budget cuts for arts and education.

"It's almost like you're going to school at some amazing fine art workshop presented in the old-school environment," he says. Mike Maher of Taylor Stitch, a local shirtmaking artisan who is participating in the Workshop, agrees: "The beauty of it is, they're giving people skills, educating them," he says. Other participants include Shepard Fairey, who will produce San Francisco Giants baseball cards, as well as Arline Klatt and Beth Lisick, who will host a release part for a letterpress book. Levi's plans to open a second Workshop in New York City this fall.

"It's going to be a Whitman freak-out jam by the waterfront," says Zach Layton in a Wall Street Journal piece by Steve Dollar (6/30/10). Zach is organizing an evening celebrating Brooklyn's own Walt Whitman, in which "dozens of artists, rockers and writers" will perform the poet's work, set to music. "I was fascinated with the weird, pyschedelic passages in his work," says Zach. "He talks a lot about orbs, and millions of orbs circling those orbs, which got me thinking about psychedelia."

Zach isn't the only one so smitten by Whitman's poetry. Holly Anderson, a poet and songwriter, is all set to read Whitman's "Locomotive in Winter," backed by her husband's band, known as February, "a multi-guitar minimalist blues band adept at chugging, circular rhythms." Says Holly: "The cadence is kick-ass ... And there's a lot of ... innuendo. C'mon it's a poem about a big locomotive!"

Here's a Whitman sampler: "Fierce throated beauty! / Roll through my chant with / all thy lawless music, thy / swinging lamps at night ..." Whoa, baby! Not all the artists find Whitman so easily adaptable to song, though. "The only challenge is, it's freaking hard to set the lines because there's no meter," says Rick Moody of the Wingdale Community Singers. "Why couldn't they do a Dickinson event? Those could all be sung to The Yellow Rose of Texas.'" The Walt-a-Palooza starts at 5 pm on July 1 and is organized by the Issue Project Room.

Photographer Philippe Halsman said that when you get someone to jump in the air, "the mask falls, so that the real person appears," reports Roberta Smith in the New York Times (5/24/10). Philippe, who died in 1979, photographed all kinds of people jumping, an art he called jumpology. This was in the 1940s and 50s, and part of a larger movement called Action Painting, "which sowed the seeds that would soon grow into performance art." His work is featured through Friday at the Laurence Miller Gallery.

His subjects included Richard Nixon and Ed Sullivan, "both in suits," and jumping "with button-down aplomb and surprising verve. Sullivan's arm is raised as if he were introducing the next act ... Audrey Hepburn, shot in a hedged garden, goes aloft with legs apart in an enthusiastic cheerleader manner that seems to fit her tightly wound, perfect-girl persona." Bridget Bardot jumped "on a rocky bluff, making you wonder how she landed."

When Salvador Dali jumped, so did everything else in the room -- easel, chair, flying water and wet, airborne cats (image). Jack Dempsey, the boxer, "goes straight up, legs together, hands positioned as if jumping rope." Philippe Halsman "pushed ... the studio portrait to extremes, exaggerating its basic components in ways that make us more aware of them: the trust that must exist between photographer and subject; the split-second 'performance' that any still camera captures ... the way we all try to rise, as it were, to the occasion of a photograph."

Laura Splan is an artist and phlebotomist who "decorates wallpaper with her own blood," reports Natalie Angier in the New York Times (5/4/10). She says people find her work "a pleasant visual engagement" but when they learn of her medium-of-choice, things get "more complicated ... a blend of ick and fascination, rearing back and coming closer." Jennifer Angus is an amateur entomologist and textile designer who builds dollhouses that are both decorated with and populated by dead insects, would understand this.

"I wanted to create a pattern that suggests a domestic space," says Jennifer, "but of course the one thing people don't want in their house is insects." Her point is to "rehabilitate the image of the insect," which she notes are critical to pollinating our crops and decomposing our trash. Fabian Pena is on a similar track, creating works of art out of dead cockroaches. "Cockroaches are a witness to our daily lives," he explains. "It's a material that I can easily find and it's cheaper than buying paint."

Christy Rupp constructed "life-sized model skeletons of a dodo ... and other birds that humans have driven to extinction." Her medium: discarded chicken bones from KFC. Her point: "throw-away food, thrown-away species -- there is a connection." Helen Altman planted various herbs and spices into a series of plastic human skulls. She hopes viewers will "stick their noses in the skulls, breathe deeply of the clove, the rose, the balsa, and let death get in their face." These and other works of organic art are on display at "Dead or Alive" at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York" through October 24.

It's not a homecoming or a field day but a fashion show that raises the school spirit at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, reports Jenny Andersen in the New York Times (5/13/10). But it's not just any fashion show. At Fieldston, students are required "to create an outfit made of anything but fabric." The concept was cooked up seven years ago by Nancy Fried, who teaches sculpture at the school, as "a way to get attention for the work of her 12 seniors."

As Nancy saw it, "drama students had their plays, the music students had their concerts, and the athletes had their games." Seven years later, not only do her sculpture students participate, but so do about 25 other students -- and the show itself attracts "more than 1,000 students, teachers, parents and grandparents." This year, the runway featured creations including a dress made of Tic Tacs "in the design of a Campbell's tomato soup can (image)."

Isabel Cohen came up with a halter top made of metal washers, matched with "a flowing, floor-length skirt made of attic insulation (image)" There were dresses made of newspapers (image), Post-it notes and Orbit gum wrappers, and even a dog "wearing an outfit ... made from Newman's Own dog food bags." Students say the challenge is not unlike "thinking up a college-application essay." No prizes are awarded, however, and no judgments rendered. "I give them all A's," says Nancy.

Since vacant lots can be magnets for broken glass, David Belt figured it made sense to turn one into a recycling center, reports Melena Ryzik in the New York Times (5/12/10). You may remember David as the guy who came up with Dumpster pools last summer. He got the idea for his latest project, Glassphemy!, while participating in a panel on urban renewal and the discussion turned to a problematic vacant lot that was littered with shattered glass.

An audience member stood up and said, "Well, I like breaking glass; let's just make it a place where you break glass." So, David went about turning vacant-lot glass-breaking into a happening. He built "a 20-foot-by-30-foot clear box, with high walls made of steel and bulletproof glass" (image). There's a high platform on one end from which people can hurl bottles at people on a lower platform on the other side, who are protected by the bullet-proof glass. As the "bottles smash fantastically, artfully designed lights flash, and no one is harmed" (video).

The installation cost David about $5,000. "Recycling's so boring," he explains. "We tried to make it a little bit more exciting ... People just want to smash things." He's also running a contest in ReadyMade magazine, where readers submit recycling ideas for the glass. He's already looking into pulverizing the glass into sand for a beer garden at the site -- which is in Brooklyn, but the exact location is a secret. But if you send a good recycling idea to David's website, Macro-Sea dot-com, you might "earn an invitation with the address."

"Didn't call it nothing ... Just go to the junkyard and see what I could get," says 91-year-old Vollis Simpson in a New York Times piece by Scott Shane (4/6/10). What he got was bits and pieces of propellers and other junk that he'd weld together into spectacular, kinetic sculptures. He's just a guy who likes to weld junk but along the way he's created "some of the most recognizable work in the genre of American homemade art by self-taught practitioners, now known as outsider art or visionary art." In fact, one of his pieces now sits outside the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

It's a "55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs" that sits "atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station ... topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels (image)." It incorporates "oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle iron parts, prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms." As one of Vollis's biggest fans says, "You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they're doing and stare and smile and say, 'Oh, my God'."

Vollis is a former farm equipment repairman who has been into welding junk into art at his home in Lucama, N.C., for 25 years now. His first project happened while he was in the army, when he made a "windmill from parts of a junked B-29 bomber to power a giant washing machine for soldiers' clothes." Years later, "he made another windmill to blow woodheated air into his home." But it was too smoky, so he planted the thing in his yard. And then he just started building more windmills and whirligigs. People come from all around to see them, and while he wasn't looking, he "became part of a seriously regarded corner of the art world."

Women express "themselves in a dizzying array of mediums: tinsel paintings, marbledust drawings, hair-work wreaths, paper cuts, quilts and embroidered samplers," reports Karen Rosenblum in the New York Times (4/16/10). Such works of women, spanning the 18th through 20th centuries, are on display at the American Folk Art Museum. The exhibit is called "Women Only: Folk Art By Female Hands" and it shows the contributions made to art by women, who haven't had opportunities to paint or sculpt like men have.

Quilts were a favorite medium, of course, among them the Cleveland-Hendricks Crazy Quilt, which worked political ribbons and other paraphernalia into a raucous but still socially acceptable textile. And the Crazy Trousseau Robe, of quilted silk and lace with metallic embroidery, hints at the unconventional life of its maker -- a thrice-married Western frontierswoman who was one of the earliest female railroad telegraphers." A piece by Maria Cadman Hubbard, Pieties Quilt, "included snippets of religious texts and homilies like 'kind words never die' and 'forgive as you hope to be forgiven'."

But while the show's focus is on women, the work itself "has social-documentary interest that is largely gender blind. The show's many mourning drawings, for instance, depict men and women weeping at the tombstones of their young offspring." The death of George Washington in 1799 also created an "explosion of mourning art." In the 19th century, "art-making was mandatory, a part of education," which for women was driven by the concept of 'Republican Motherhood,' or the belief that women ought to be educated so that they could raise moral sons." The show runs through September 12th.