THE LIFE VICARIOUS

L'asso replacing Chipotle all week at this week's CMJ Marathon.

Last year was the first Music Marathon to have a press and artist's lounge full of free sneakers and jars of pomade but it failed to feed with an on-site Chipotle to serving starving musicians and bloggers for only one afternoon. This year's lounge is an improvement, with L'asso serving pies from 12 - 6 all week long then ending the week with two nights of semi-private pizza parties featuring the restaurant's favorite bands and comedians on hand to celebrate their five year anniversary. You can RSVP here for the festivities.

Diane Birch is also performing Saturday night, sinking her AM radio hooks into the only CMJ show this year being held at City Winery. Tickets are still available.

KAWS channels Kehinde Wiley for Michael Jackson tribute.

On top is a KAWS portrait of Michael Jackson from the new issue of Interview. We love KAWS and the white glove tribute is an ideal fit for the King of Pop but there's just something about this that's so Kehinde Wiley (bottom) we don't know why they didn't ask him instead.

Rock star chefs performing all over New Jersey this weekend.

The Feedbag announced the line-up of celebrity chefs at All Points West. Tailor's Sam Mason, Discovery en Espanol TV chef Marcela Valladolid, (who's been Twittering about her appearance) and former Top Chef contestant Nikki Cascone, chef of 24 Prince. However no one's mentioned the cost; if food is the highlight of the line-up for you, it comes at a price. VIP lunch and dinner is only available to Platinum VIPs paying $439 a day. $189 a day buys you the basic VIP ticket which includes refreshments courtesy of Bacardi and hors d'oeuvre.

If a rock star chef is that important to you, the Bruce Springsteen of food, New Jersey native son Tom Collichio will be rocking out beginning tonight at the Atlantic City Food & Wine Festival where he'll be a gourmet pizza bash, food and wine spectacular, and like any real rock star oblivious to logic, he'll be following a healthy eating workshop with an afterparty at the House of Blues.

Alas the afterparties for All Points West will be out of town, back in Manhattan at the Red Bull Space. Details after the jump.

Honor your salivary glands, avoid APW for AC Food & Wine Fest.

(MCA bowed out at APW but the show goes on at ACF&W with Tom Collichio.)

Next Friday, July 31st, All Points West kicks off in Liberty State Park with the Beastie Boys as headliners. At least until yesterday. The band was forced to cancel after Adam Yauch was diagnosed with a tumor in his salivary gland. So what better way to honor him than making the most of yours?

If you're going to take the train to New Jersey anyway next weekend, make it the ACES, and head down to the Atlantic City Food & Wine Festival, July 30th through August 2nd. Only two events are so far sold out, a a clambake with Guy Fieri and a cooking demo with Emeril which as an added bonus means you won't have to associate with Guy Fieri or Emeril groupies.

Single day tickets to All Points West are $89 plus fees so for the same price, TBA on the main stage can be replaced with Tom Colicchio as your headliner at an all night dance party at the House of Blues for $50. Then close it out at 2am, catch the 230am ACES train back ($58 RT) and be in bed by dawn all for under $100. Sure Colicchio may not fight for your right to party, but you can be sure he knows how to cater it.

From the Canadian Pavilion to Canadian Independence Day.

We miss MuchMusic. Ed the Sock. Fromage. That Asian chick with the alternative videos. That other Asian chick with the show where everyone was freezing outside just wanting to dance to Daft Punk. All the white people VH1 stole then threw away. And the black guy in the kilt. Pour out a little syrup for him tonight.

Brooklyn's then and again edible, imbibable, audible appeal.

(We ate as many cupcakes at Edible Brooklyn's Uncorked, Wednesday at BAM.) 

Worth mentioning was the value of Wednesday's Brooklyn Uncorked, Edible Brooklyn's annual Long Island wine tasting and showcase of some of the boroughs best bites. At $40, (or $20 if you were wise enough to discern the discount code) it was worth it for a goodie bag full of all the current Edible issues and a Bodum coffee press travel mug but better than that was filling up on the flavor of the above bourbon iced buttermilk cupcakes provided by the Smoke Joint.

We'll be heading back to Brooklyn for more booziness soon enough and while it does involve the Bell House this June, it's not the first annual Brooklyn Beer Experiment on the 7th but one week later when our favorite band of alcoholic Norwegians, Ida Maria, show on our shores once again. Tickets are on sale now for their show on the 14th when we'll be seeing them for the third time this year.

All Points West tickets already on sale to those that can't afford them.

 Follow the APW Twitter and you may already know this, if not, use the password above to take part in today's presale. If 1.) you can't wait that long and 2.) you can't afford the $89 daily ticket price or the $199 three day pass, fear not. Three day passes (and parking passes) are already available on layaway from Ticketmaster. The pass costs $267 which we're guessing includes fees and you can either pay in three installments or half now, the rest by July 3rd. The full pass may be worth it this time around as there's no real weak link in the lineup, that is, depending on your feelings toward Coldplay.

Coldplay outdoors in Jersey City, but will the W Hoboken host Cloris Leachman?

  

Two big announcements this week. First there's that whole All Points West thing. Yes by far the best ever concert to take place outside our bedroom window will be taking place this year from July 31st to August 2nd. The Beastie Boys, Vampire Weekend, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Q-Tip, Arctic Monkeys, Crystal Castles, Yelle, Lykke Li, MGMT, that's who we're most excited about. But don't count out Hoboken who kicks off the area's summer festival season with the Hoboken International Film Festival on May 29th.

This year's honoree? Cloris Leachman! She'll be following in the footsteps of last year's lifetime achiever, Lando Calrissian. The full line-up won't be announced for a few more weeks, but we're going to take a wild guess and say her newest film, Inglorious Bastards, will not be debuting here. Although we can't tell you how excited we'd be to have Hoboken prove us wrong. We're going to keep our dreams small for now and hope at the very least they make use of the newly opened W Hoboken. We don't know how the HIFF survived this long without a place to put up its star power but now that the W just opened its doors down the block from the fondue restaurant that hosted last year's festivities, we can't wait to see Cloris Leachman swinging from the ceiling in the Chandelier Room.

Of course you need not be an octogenarian actress or married to a girl named GOOP to trash a stylish hotel room. The W quietly opened this past weekend with a $189 introductory rate. All but the aforementioned Chandelier Room is operational and the official grand opening date has been set for April 23rd.

Ida Maria, last night at Mercury Lounge, tonight at Union Hall.

 (Yes, we stole this picture of the crowd at Mercury from BrooklynVegan because we're in it.)

We don't write all that much about music on this site but last night's Ida Maria show at Mercury Lounge -enthusiastic audience shown above - thirty minutes of pure emotion and energy that never missed a note and needed no encore - may have been the best show we've ever seen and we can't wait to do it again. (And if anyone has tickets for tonight's sold out show at Union Hall, please don't hesitate to contact us!) With no disrespect to any other currently touring indie rockers who are into us, if we had to choose we'd leave you in a second for her. (Um, of course you're still welcome to stay with us when you play Webster Hall. No hard feelings? Or are you not going to teach us how to dance with her now?) Below are a few better performances of the band earlier this year in Sweden, reminding us of all the best parts of shows we saw back in the day, like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at Brownies without the self-awareness or The Libertines at CBGBs without the homoeroticism.

Related:

Upcoming and downloading banging music in the new year. (12/10/08)

Less terrifying ways to wake up to Morrissey and Marc Jacobs this morning.

 

If you've ever wondered what we do, when we've got nothing better to do, here's a retro '80s way to spend the day:

This morning at 10am the presale begins to buy tickets for Morrissey at Bowery Ballroom on March 21st. Tickets are $75 and the presale should be all over by 10:01am at which time you could already have found a buyer for your pair on Craigslist for two or three times face value. Assuming you're not seeing the concert with your friends. And if you're not...

You can use that money you're going to make to head down to the Louis Vuitton SoHo store which opens at 11am, transformed into some sort of Stephen Sprouse day-glo graffiti mausoleum. The new postmortem collaboration launches tomorrow with the sale of $2850 graffiti print skateboards and a limited edition of 70 rose printed tee shirts at $250 each. If you want to double-down you can then take that tee shirt home and sell it on eBay for $500.

So let's say you bought four Morrissey tickets, you'll have spent $300. Sell three and you've got one ticket for yourself and at least $150 profit. Spend $500 on two shirts, keep one for yourself, sell the other for $500, and you're basically up one concert ticket, one tee shirt to wear to said concert and $150 cash all for just taking an early lunch hour. There are worse ways to spend a January morning, like waking up to Morrissey holding your baby or Marc Jacobs wanting you to check his luggage.

Such a better scene is the one above, from one of the too few contemporary Merchant-Ivory pictures, the 1989 film Slaves of New York, in which Steve Buscemi plays Sprouse. (And not once is it mentioned on the We Love Sprouse website Vuitton has up!) You can see him take the stage at the end of the fashion show in which Sprouse's clothes were used.