Following Dieu Donné’s paper trail
By Kaija Helmetag
For two workers in a white-walled room in Manhattan’s Garment District on a recent weekday afternoon, paper was more than something to shuffle. Wearing rubber boots and aprons, two women fed pieces of torn paper into a pulverizing machine and watched as it transformed into pulp.

Punks, rebels, and hustlers at the gate
By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
With one eye on the hood, and one eye on history, Clayton Patterson says he has taken over a half million photos of Lower East Side denizens in the last three decades. In this place where worlds within worlds exist, Patterson has sought out those who stand out, especially “the forgotten ones,” he says — though not for long: From Sept. 10 through Oct. 27, their portraits will be on view at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen.

After two years of silence, Howl! returns
By Rachel Breitman
This week the Howl! festival returns from a two-year hiatus to tip its hat to what’s left of the East Village’s risqué street life and club scene. Bearing the name of Alan Ginsberg’s 1955 epic love letter to the “supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,” the festival memorializes a time before downtown fell siege to $5 lattes and pricey real estate.

Koch on film
By Ed Koch
“Superbad” (-) This is one of the funnier movies I have seen over the years. There is no nudity or sexually explicit scenes, but because of the theme of the film and the obscene language that is constantly used, it is one of the most vulgar films I have ever seen.

‘Dining Room’ in no need of remodeling
By Jerry Tallmer
It is like a string of pearls, or what you glimpse from one subway train when it is being passed by another — scene, scene, scene, scene, each scene, each vignette conveying a moment, a life, a relationship, a crisis, a stasis, an attitude, an essence, a turning point, all in this one big old honorable dining room that is many dining rooms before the play is out.

Love in the time of turmoil
By Leonard L. Quart
Eytan Fox is an Israeli director whose last film, the skillfully crafted and entertaining “Walk on Water,” a thriller with a gay subtext, became the most successful Israeli film ever shown abroad. All the Eytan Fox directed films I have seen, whatever else they are about, deal very openly with gay sex and love. (An earlier work, “Yossi and Jagger,” depicted the love affair between two officers in the Israeli army.)

Where the workers have no name
By Jennifer O’Reilly
The stage for “Walmartopia” is set with a familiar yellow smiley face looming on the closed curtain — impossibly friendly yet also somewhat ominous. Which is fitting, since the smiley face is the mascot of the nation’s mega discount store, a banana-colored emblem of the supposed joy and happiness Wal-Mart brings to the masses.