TriBeCaCoOpTedByDeNiRo

Travis Bickle’s goons are claiming that they have the exclusive right to use the word “Tribeca” in association with entertainment-related goods and services:

Tribeca: The term coined to describe the triangle-shaped neighborhood below Canal St. has morphed in recent years, becoming a veritable brand name to signify all that is hip, artsy and quintessentially New York. The name has been slapped on a Subaru S.U.V. model and a line of high-end Lenox dinnerware sold by Bed Bath & Beyond.

But if Robert DeNiro gets his way in a federal lawsuit filed Jan. 29, the name Tribeca (at least where entertainment is concerned) will mean only one thing — the Tribeca Film Festival.

The Film Fest and its associated companies have filed suit against the grassroots Web site Tribeca.net and its founder, Chuck Harris, a 34-year resident of the neighborhood. The suit claims that Harris’ cyberspace-based arts organization, Tribeca Network, infringes on the Film Festival’s intellectual property rights because it uses the name Tribeca — a component of several Film Festival trademarks — in conjunction with “entertainment related goods and services.”

Those goods and services include a series of free “channels” where users can post videos, art and writing; a Web-based radio station called Radio Free Tribeca; and a virtual store that offers a smattering of Tribeca Network merchandise. DeNiro’s lawyers have demanded that Harris turn over his domain names to the Film Festival and provide an accounting of all his site’s revenues.

“From their lips to god’s ears,” Harris said of the demand for revenue documents. “We have yet to bring in our first penny. We haven’t even sold a t-shirt.”

Hey Johnny Boy, what about the Tribeca Performing Arts Center? Tribeca Blues? The Tribeca club in Manchester, England?

From Dick Wolf’s Sick Mind To Your TV In Just 101 Days

From November 7 to February 16 — 101 days — is how long it takes for stories to make it from the headlines to Law & Order episodes:

One grim gray morning three weeks ago, two homicide detectives strode into a small Manhattan apartment and gazed up at a petite young woman dangling by her neck from a ceiling pipe rigged with a homemade nylon noose. “It’s about time,” grumbled a dreadlocked medical examiner. “You have any idea what it’s like being stuck in here with a swinger?

Objects in the room told the story of the dead woman’s promising career. Near stacks of videocassettes, the walls were decorated with posters for independent films featuring images of the young woman, an actress turned director who had been renting the apartment as an office.

If the details of the crime scene called to mind the death of Adrienne Shelly, the 40-year-old actress and director who was hanged in her Greenwich Village office in November, what happened next did not: After two police technicians cut the body down from the pipe, the corpse, played by a 40-year-old stuntwoman named Jennifer Lamb, headed into a nearby room to nurse her 4-month-old daughter.

“Law & Order” was at it again, ripping a gruesome crime from the headlines and transforming it into an hour of fast-moving, plot-driven television, which in this instance will be broadcast Friday night at 10 on NBC. Although the use of such raw source material is common on the program, this particular real-life victim had an eerie way of returning to people’s minds during production.

. . .

In reality, barely a New York minute passed between the moment Ms. Shelly’s life ended and the moment it became fodder for prime-time drama.

After Ms. Shelly’s body was found hanging from a shower rod on Nov. 1, investigators initially suspected suicide. But a footprint in her bathroom led the police to a 19-year-old Ecuadorean illegal immigrant named Diego Pillco who had been doing construction work in a downstairs apartment, and the police determined that they had a murder on their hands.

On Nov. 7 and 8, the morning newspapers were filled with macabre accounts of the crime, as pieced together by the police. According to the authorities, Mr. Pillco had struck Ms. Shelly in the face and, suspecting he had killed her, then faked her suicide by hanging her from the shower rod with a bedsheet. The police said Mr. Pillco admitted that Ms. Shelly had complained about construction noise and that after their confrontation grew violent and he pleaded with her not to call the police, he had hit her and then hanged her body, in an apparent effort to conceal his crime. The city medical examiner later ruled that Ms. Shelly had died not from a blow but from “compression of the neck.”

The story had all the earmarks of drama and sensationalism that make a successful “Law & Order” episode, and Dick Wolf, the creator of the show and its sister series, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” was hardly the only one to take notice. The morning the faked-suicide story broke, three people, including Mr. Wolf’s barber and the counterman who poured his coffee at Dean & DeLuca, brought the story to his attention as material for a new episode.

“It just screams it,” said Mr. Wolf, who reads a half-dozen newspapers a day, in part to stimulate story ideas.

Over the next few weeks, Mr. Wolf and the program’s writing “show runner,” Nicholas Wootton, batted around ways to take the apparently straightforward footprint-leads-to-the-killer story line and give it the whiplash-inducing plot twists the show is known for.

Earlier: Law & Order To Become A Show-Within-A-Show Self-Contained World.

If They Concoct Entire Terror Plots In Order To Nab Would-Be Bombers, Then Why Not Also This?

So paranoid:

A graffiti crew called “Made U Look NYC” — or MUL NYC — is boasting to have spray-painted a piece spanning 10 subway cars last month, according to a Web site madeulooknyc.com.

The site is selling T-shirts featuring a photo of an R train with the Monopoly character painted on it, and promoting a 60-minute documentary about the piece’s creation that they plan to auction on eBay Mar. 1.

Some bloggers, however, speculate that the NYPD may be behind this stunt as a way to lure the culprits.

“If you were thinking of buying a T-shirt commemorating Made U Look’s painting of 10 whole NYC subway cars, you may want to reconsider now,” warned city blog RazorApple.com. Its recent posting of an explainer showing how the NYPD might be monitoring the site’s visitors got picked up by various blogs such as Gawker and Gothamist.

“It seems illogical that [MUL] would incriminate themselves in this way, with a Web site selling T-shirts,” Razor Apple’s editor Will Sherman told Metro yesterday, “but stranger things have happened.”

Sherman doesn’t doubt MUL was behind the “staggering feat” of painting the 750-foot-long piece — “Nothing this large was put on the subway since Easter Sunday 1988,” he said — but the site’s photos, which appear to have been taken at a rail yard on Dec. 26, seemed fishy, he thought. “It’s hard for me to believe they were able to film and take all those photos in daylight.”

He grew more suspicious after an e-mail exchange he had with “Frank,” who responded to the e-mail address listed on MUL NYC’s site. “He talked about other members in his crew, calling them ‘gentlemen,'” Sherman said. “I wouldn’t think you would describe the people in your crew like that.”

“Frank” denied allegations of police involvement in an e-mail to Metro.

Sculptor + Sitting Around Watching Too Much Daytime Television = Bad Ahistorical Art

Mr. Miller, put down the remote . . . and for pete’s sake, stay away from the Oprah books:

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.

. . .

Algernon Miller, who designed the memorial site, said he “was inspired by this story line,” which he discovered in the library. His was a re-interpretation, he said, noting that he was “taking a soft material, a quilt, and converting it into granite.”

“Traditionally what African-Americans do is take something and reinterpret into another form,” he said.

. . .

Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission, rattled off the historians’ problems in a telephone interview: There is no surviving example of an encoded quilt from the period. The code was never mentioned in any of the interviews of ex-slaves carried out in the 1930’s by the Works Progress Administration. There is no mention of quilting codes in any diaries or memoirs from the period.

Mr. Miller responded to critics: “No matter what anyone has to say, they weren’t there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret.”

Please, Connie, Make It Stop

I have to say, I’d much rather Jeff Vandam crib from the Villager than write features about the stupid shit people put on YouTube:

On Saturday, Dec. 16, three actresses in their 20s ventured out to Herald Square with a video camera and a surreptitious mission: to approach unsuspecting pedestrians from behind and gently stroke their hair without their knowledge. They filmed one another’s efforts, which for the most part succeeded in failing to attract notice from various hair pettees, bar a few suspicious looks.

A few weeks later, having edited the video and set it to a kind of funky elevator music, the women posted it on YouTube, the Internet video site. Since then, the Hair Petting Game, as it is called, has been viewed nearly 25,000 times on YouTube, and thousands more times through links. The reaction has not been mild.

“Worst video ever,” someone called TheRealWilliamBailey wrote on YouTube, an opinion repeated in various forms by many others. “You should play in traffic.”

Some watched the video and called it harmless, even joyful, though such comments were in a distinct minority. “I want to be indignant about how awful this is, too. I really do,” wrote Caroline, a user on Gothamist.com, one of the first sites to link to the Hair Petting Game. “However, I am sitting in my office laughing hysterically at this video. Am I an idiot, too? Maybe.”