.?NEW YORK -- Birds are chirping, the grass is green and tea is being served amid blossoming bushes.Welcome to New York City in January, with a cure for cold-weather blues: a pop-up indoor park that's open through Valentine's Day.Despite temperate temperatures so far this year, "it's our rebellion against winter," says Jonathan Daou, founder and CEO of Openhouse Gallery, which holds a 20-year lease on the space.The 5,000-square-foot (464-square-meter) artificial habitat, called Park Here, is filled with trees, rocks, picnic benches and the recorded ambient sounds of Central Park in spring. On a recent weekday afternoon, babies played barefoot in the 75-degree (23 degrees Celsius) world while their parents ate cookies and sandwiches.A movie night is planned on the lawn. Other days bring a ping pong competition, a trivia contest, wine tastings and soccer workshops.But the park will be gone by mid-February.The rest of the year, the space is a stage for business that plays on the "pop-up" retail method: a quick presentation of a product, performance or personality, with no commitment to a lease or contract. It's usually set up in a mobile unit that can be assembled and disappear.Since its inception four years ago, Openhouse Gallery has created installations for high-end clients such as auto manufacturer Mercedes-Benz, a group of Italian leather tanneries and Google. Other setups involved skating and stadium seating for World Cup soccer viewing.In August, Jay-Z and Kanye West used Openhouse Gallery for the rollout of their "Watch The Throne" album. When Jay-Z tweeted "201 Mulberry Street, NYC," thousands of people swarmed outside."It's .2 acres with so much positive energy," Daou says.The garden is free to the public and open daily noon to 8 p.m.The rest of the year, clients pay $4,000 to $8,000 a day for the venue.___Online:
?In the fall of 2010, I lived in Los Angeles as I prepared to direct Rampart. Rampart is a movie about a very bad cop (Woody Harrelson) who refuses to surrender his brutal sense of street justice. Set in 1999 -- a time of great change -- the LAPD, hemorrhaging prestige and money from the extensive Rampart anti-gang unit Scandal, was put under the microscope, restructured, reworked and rebranded.Like some post-Western Hollywood movie, the LAPD of the late 90s presented its cops with a very simple choice: change your ways, help rebuild the LAPD image, or fade away. Evidence tampering, police brutality, robbery, drug dealing, perjury, even murder charges were all lobbed at the Rampart police department, based on one or two corrupt cops' testimonies, and the flood gates opened to accusations that still resonate today, many true, many false, all palpable in the war zone that is the world of law enforcement in this country.That fall, I was talking with cops, trying to get into their heads, get a sense of their heart, who they are as human beings. One white cop, leaning confidently on his idled squad car in downtown LA, took his time explaining to me that the battle for the streets of Los Angeles is never ending and it's the same everywhere. He laid out a grim picture that ultimately defined his world: there are criminals out there who play their parts brilliantly as bad guys so that the police only have to play their part as the opposing force. It's all very well defined, a cat and mouse game that lasts all day every day. Each side is under siege and each side reacts with a vengeance. The rules of the game are a matter of who gets away with what and for how long. He told me endless stories in great detail about capers and heists, about gangbangers and shootouts, and he told me many stories about the sex lives of cops (which made a lot of sense as he was basically describing the thrill of power games. Sex, as we know, goes hand in hand with fantasies of domination, to use a metaphor). He told me a few stories about the horrors he's seen and then hinted at the horrors he's committed. Over 20 years on the department, he's been penalized for many misdeeds, but he says he just can't get enough of the grind, the action, of "hitting the street, getting down with the game" and trying to win for his team every day.Hours later I found out that even though many of his stories were laced with cheerful racism, homophobia, sexism and ant-Semitism, his girlfriend was black, his brother gay, and his sister a Jewish convert who married a Jewish man and raises her kids within the faith. He told me he loved his family.In a word, it was a show. He was a performer. And he had me from the get-go. He played his part, he wasn't kidding, there's a certain theatricality to police work. He was a character, in the same way I was about to make Woody Harrelson a character in a movie, except for him the consequences were real.Before we said goodbye, I asked him "how does it stop?" How is this war, this occupation mentality, this theater of siege and retribution get resolved?

Дедуля, мы помним! Скоро приеду тебя навестить....

4 года как тебя нет с нами.......

Инвалид ВОВ и просто хороший человек

Мы тебя никогда не забудем, дедуля