This Saturday, the New Museum of Contemporary Art will officially open its new building on the Bowery between Stanton and Rivington. If you've been around the area you may have noticed the rising stack of icy white boxes—designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA—that seem as if they're about to topple over into Nolita. You may have even confused them for condos and shaken your head at the imminent Soho-ifying of the Lower East Side.

Instead, the New Museum exhibits contemporary artwork from all around the world. On Saturday, the opening exhibits include a performance piece by New York artist Sharon Hayes about communication, as well as an expansive thirty artist exhibit called Unmonumental: The Object in the 21^st Century, which examines new methods of sculpture and creation. The Seoul collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has also created Black on White, Gray Ascending, a complex, multi-faceted film noir narrative combining text, animation, and music.

In celebration of its opening, the New Museum will be open for 30 free hours starting at noon, meaning that you can walk in at 11:30 p.m from a bar—the New Museum may seriously regret this.

Tickets can be found on the New Museum website, but they are close to being (if not already) sold out. In any case, you should head downtown Saturday and try to get your hands on unused or extra tickets, or pry them from someone's unwitting, skinny little fist. Nighttime may be the best time to go; even if you can't get a ticket you'll be within walking distance to bars in the area like Max Fish or Good World, which will probably be packed with New Museum refugees.

- James DeWille

If orientation is just a little too lame for you, check out these cultural events happening around the city. How would you like to remember your first week of Columbia? Pie eating or museums and films? Bwog staffer Lucy Tang shows you how.

Saturday, September 1

3 pm — P.S. 1 Warm Up
Twisted Ones hosts a Brooklyn/Pittsburgh Underground Rock Celebration with:
Oneida
Sightings
Ex-Models
Dirty Faces
DJ Knox Overstreet
DJ Weirds
DJs Fitz and Brad Truax
Mighty Robot AV Squad

Word of advice to the skinny-jean inclined: Columbia hates hipsters, find kindred spirits here.

August 21 through Sunday, September 2

New York Korean Film Festival

Despite the racial makeup of SEAS, Asians are more than engineers, they also major in film studies!

Wednesday, September 5

8:00pm — 92nd Street Y: Michael Palin of Monty Python with Lorne Michaels

Go hear two founders discuss their respective overrated projects

Friday, September 7

Midnight - UCB Theater —

Aziz Ansari, Paul Scheer and a guest panel discuss chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet. Antonioni and Bergman may have passed on, but R. Kelly seems poised to continue the tradition.

What to do this weekend? Well, you could do the usual, whatever that is - studying on a Saturday night, going to 1020, or the ever-fulfilling Carman parties. But there are some things that you can only do this weekend, because they're soon shuffling off this mortal coil. To wit:

-Films closing Thursday include, at the AMC Loews 84th Street, the martial-arts epic Curse of the Golden Flower; at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the pedophilia-in-academia heartwarmer The History Boys; and also at the Lincoln Plaza, the distinctively titled Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which had one of the most bizarre trailers Bwog has ever seen. (Warning: trailer contains intimations of violence and Dustin Hoffman attempting some sort of pan-European accent). Hurry, because by Friday, these films will be replaced by the likes of The Hitcher.

-Closing this Sunday will be the Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Leibovitz is responsible for some of the most recognizable celebrity images of the past few decades, including Demi Moore naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair and a pre-Hollywood Squares Whoopi Goldberg emerging from a bathtub of milk. The exhibit covers her magazine photography as well as personal shots of herself and her partner, On Photography author Susan Sontag. Annie, if you're reading this: want to shoot a cover for The Blue and White?

The Met and MoMA are undeniably spectacular, but you'll visit them for Art and Lit Hum sometime in the next four years. Instead, Bwog recommends that you art fans start with obscurity and work your way up! Bwog art critic Julia Butareva brings you nine museums where tourists won't clog the exhibits. You're a New Yorker now, after all.

P.S.1

P.S. 1, an extension of MoMA focusing on young contemporary artists, is in Queens. That's right, Queens. The art is a mixed bag, but it's a wonderful place to spend the day--if the art tires you, hang out on the roof and observe all the fashionable people. All summer, they hold Warm Up dance parties, which involve beer and more fashionable people. Hurry, because the last one is on Sept. 2nd. Columbia students get in free here — it's part of MoMA — but bring $10 for the dance party cover.
Admission: Free
Hours: 12-6 Thursday through Monday
Address: Jackson Ave. and 46th Ave. in Long Island City
Directions: 1 to Times Square, then 7 to 45th Rd./Courthouse Square; Exit onto Jackson Avenue and walk right one block to 46th Avenue.

Studio Museum in Harlem

This is a lovely, community-oriented museum within walking distance of Columbia. Exhibits of high school kids' photography share space with fun and interesting contemporary art by mostly local artists.
Admission: $3 suggested
Hours: 12-6; Saturday 10-6
Address: 144 West 125th Street
Directions: Walk north to 125th and head east.

The Met and the Frick may be stimulating, but for some real deviance, Bwog recommends the Museum of Sex, a 2002 addition to New York City's artistic firmament.

One tipster recommends that visitors not miss the Sex Across America electronic exhibition, which features listings of visitor-submitted stories of various sexual encounters, sorted geographically Mapquest-style. Columbia features prominently: two stories involve sex in Butler (one on the roof, as seen from John Jay, and yes, one in the stacks), one each in Carman and Ruggles, over a half-dozen at Barnard, and even one behind the statue of Pan in front of Lewisohn.

Aroused?: Mosex is located on 5th Ave at 27th St. Sexual edification will cost you $13.50, and potentially a measure of awkwardness.

The MoMA has done it again. They've brought us another huge, ambitious show, in the vein of last summer's Cezanne-Pisarro. This time, the subject is Edvard Munch. The show is excellent—it not only rehabilitates the underrated Munch but also sheds new light on the artist. With many little-known works in addition to the greatest hits, MoMA reveals a deeper, more complex Munch than the gloomy, misogynistic caricature.

Bwog Correspondent Mark Holden reports:

The Big Kiss II went down last Saturday, this time at the Whitney Museum. Apparently, an art professor thought it would be hilarious if a bunch of college kids started smooching in the middle of his exhibition. Which is exactly what happened.

This Big Kiss didn't achieve the Low Steps version's turnout, attracting only 20 participants. But these were the real deal: no second rate saliva-swapping this time around. As before, a whistle signaled the beginning and end of the Kiss. A sizable crowd of bystanders accumulated as the Kiss progressed, reacting with everything from disgust to benign amusement to fascinated excitement. One kid got really worked up, taking oodles of photos with his camera phone and exclaiming that "his friends would never believe it!" He also seemed rather titillated by the girl-on-girl action.

One older (i.e. late 30s) couple was standing on the bridge when the
kissers skipped up and set to work. Their faces betrayed their amusement, however, and the two even hazarded a few pecks themselves. When the whistle sounded to end the kissing, the couples skipped off the bridge to amusement and scattered applause from the onlookers.