Election Night Special

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Tonight, either Obama or McCain trades in his peripatetic life for a four-year lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Meanwhile, down at the fulcrum of Chinatown/Little Italy/Soho, Storefront hosts the just-voted for an all-night congress. Regardless of which candidate incarnates your Commander-in-Chief, the space celebrates democracy's crowning moment with the red-blue counts on a large-scale projection, blog-reading stations for the extra zealous, and — guaranteed or your money back — yapping prognosticators. All in all, the night’s not unlike the circus maximus that is politics; in fact, a boisterous turnout is a natural end-of-the-road, one that recalls slipping into REM: you’ll have to wait to see if the oncoming dream is bad or good.

Literary Rebels: A Discussion with Edmund White and Francine du Plessix Gray

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The sad-eyed muse of untold poets and writers, Arthur Rimbaud famously left the belles lettres after a prodigious adolescence for a life of gunrunning and adventure. In a new biography, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, celebrated critic Edmund White returns to everyone's favorite poète maudit, whose swashbuckling verse, personality, and escapades assured his place beyond academia's hallways. Alongside White, Pulitzer-Prize-nominated critic Francine du Plessix Gray adds a feminine perspective to tonight's discussion as she touts her tome on the Romantic's rebel-in-petticoats, Madame de Staël. The "first modern woman," de Staël's page-turning life includes being banished by Napoleon and hobnobbing with royalty and the literary elite, like Byron and Goethe.

100 Years of Animation: Serge Bromberg presents Treasures from a Chest

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Émile Cohl has become the Jeopardy answer that leaves folks empty-headed after an initial "Who is...?" Cohl, commonly known as the "Father of the Animated Cartoon," screened the first fully animated cartoon film, Fantasmagorie, in 1908. A hundred anthropomorphic years after the fact, the never-say-die preservationist Serge Bromberg selects Cohl's surreal two-minute reel and its enchanting chalk-line effect to commemorate the genre's centennial. Tonight's other animations include an anti-Nazi short that features George Pál's exquisite puppets and a wonderful Koko the Clown episode by the Fleischers. Like any connoisseur, Bromberg shares rhapsodic anecdotes about each piece in between his blast-to-the-past piano accompaniments.

BadAss Burlesque

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Led by the eclectic Velocity Chyaldd, the talented ladies of BadAss Burlesque go all out for tonight's revue. The monthly affair with nothing to hide takes over the poetry-minded Bowery storefront for the one night when everyone obeys the program's M.O.: to "strut the planet without shame." And the titillating performers truly adhere to the proud-not-prudish mantra, as they treat spectators to kittenish parody, mood-altering live music, and, of course, a surplus of hair-raising visual stimuli.

Floating Brothel

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In the minimalist work Floating Brothel, all the world's a 3' x 6' platform. Within the liberating confines of the shrunken, Lecoq-inspired stage, this performance recounts the saga of three female convicts and their yearlong odyssey from the Dickens-documented slums of London to a dying all-male penal colony in New South Wales. Adapted from fascinating 18th-century accounts, the production eschews the traditional romantic or rococo depiction of the period in favor of a raw, stripped-down aesthetic; from the five ace thespians to the imaginative, multi-purpose props, each little gesture adds to the company's crackerjack interpretation of what might otherwise be one of history's shadowy footnotes.

The Devils

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The lurid nature of Ken Russell's work attracts the curious like a bug-swirled lamp. Fittingly, his most notorious excess, The Devils, screens on the calendar's most debauched night. Very loosely based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun, the 1971 flick stars Oliver Reed as Urbain Grandier, a licentious, but lionhearted 17th-century French priest charred after a bogus witch hunt blames him for "bewitching" local nuns into an orgiastic frenzy. Of course, the plot is beside the point, as Russell provides your post-film discussion topics with his leftfield depictions of historical figures (i.e. Cardinal Richelieu), ultra-violent torture sequences, and the nun’s un-sisterly acts—the provocateur visualizes that blasphemous urge to “get whoopee at a nunnery.”

I Am Curious (Yellow)

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Back in the late '60s, our avert-thy-eyes censors banned Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow) for its free-love approach toward cinematic sexuality. Its improprieties were essentially a shooting script for today's softcore porn: frontal nudity, choreographed intercourse, and, most unholy, the kissing of flaccid genitalia. In this legendarily subversive (and also humorous) import, Lena Nyman (as herself) plays an eager-beaver sociologist who undertakes a hands-on sex survey. The footage isn't just la-di-da T&A though — it's most memorable for jump-cutting between fictional and vérité elements as it pores over Sweden's sexual, political, and artistic mores. As it happens, the most unexpected sequence may be Sjöman's back-and-forth on civil disobedience with Martin Luther King.

Michel Gondry: You'll Like This Film Because You're In It

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Michel Gondry creating a how-to book on filmmaking is a little like Italo Calvino penning a fiction-writing manual — it's bound to be delivered in a one-of-a-kind idiom. Tonight's reading of You'll Like This Film Because You're In It finds the low-tech French auteur pushing — in no uncertain terms — for egalité and liberté for filmmakers everywhere. The DIY tome also reflects on Gondry's last film, Be Kind Rewind, and addresses the BKR-inspired films made at Deitch Projects, where the director set up a makeshift studio for fan reenactments. Crafting a classic is never as easy as lights, camera, action, but Gondry's noncommercial, yes-you-can approach is a good start.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

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Melvin Van Peebles raised a middle finger to the police and Hollywood with his watershed 1971 film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The title's extra letters hint at the formal innovations, which include surreal negative images and split screens, but are lacking beside Van Peebles' man-with-a-mission title of writer/producer/actor/editor/director/composer. As actor, Van Peebles portrays Sweetback — a young black lady-killer on the lam after doling out justice to two racist cops — with a swagger that befits his moniker. As director, he bellows the message that he, his "Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man," and his no-budget film are independent to the “t.”

The Rejection Show

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Unfortunately, rejection is a written-in part of life. But if you're a comedian, at least you can turn the capital N-O into some solid material. Case in point: the Rejection Show, which assembles a true-life program from the crumpled scraps of disappointment that people usually prefer to forget. Tonight's comic confessors include the multi-talented Reggie Watts, Elna Baker, Kurt Braunohler, Comedy Central's Patrick Borelli, and the wry fellows from Front Page Films. Of course, the reception of the career gaffes promises to be scattered across the cough-or-guffaw spectrum: at worst, good riddance to the wah-wah material; at best, the stand-up acts recall Philip Larkin on Sidney Bechet—“on me your voice falls as they say love should, like an enormous yes."

Recycling & Resourcefulness: Quilts from the 1930s

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For Recycling & Resourcefulness, the American Folk Art Museum unfurls 12 quilts that were sewn together from secondhand fabrics by women during the Great You-Know-What. The striking, variegated handiwork features materials as diverse as flour sacks and dressmaking scraps, and the handsome individual pieces match up with themes such as sunbonnets, the alphabet, and Chinese fans. More than salvaged vestiges of a once-prevalent pastime, the patterns are tidy examples of the functional achieving fine-art status. The museum's permanent collection supplements the exhibit with more pieces crafted from flotsam and jetsam, including Wonderbread Rug (made from plastic Wonder Bread bags) and Baby Blanket (a patchwork of aluminum-wrapped condoms).

Home Movie Day

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In honor of Home Movie Day, Anthology offers up its projectors to the Great Unwatched. From hermetic auteurs to film-school stylists, everyone and their mother can take advantage of the six-hour open screening and share homemade creations on a first-come, first-served basis. This celebration of deeply personal expression brings together a wide range of subject matter, giving ultra-low-budget horror movies, polished experimental shorts, and birthday-party documentaries their moments in the dark. Rather than letting your chef d'oeuvre be marked by art's scarlet A — anonymity — give your reels the true silver-screen treatment. Film archivists are on hand to dish thoughtful tips on how to preserve your masterpiece.

Evita Sing-Along

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Like the swallows of Capistrano, critics always return to Evita as Madonna's one Hollywood highlight. As the Material Girl's directorial debut Filth and Wisdom (starring Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hütz) hits marquees, the Sunshine reimagines this emotional musical by turning it into a larger-than-life karaoke party. Through 85 costume changes and many burst-into-bombast numbers, Madonna portrays the life and times of Argentina's "spiritual leader of the nation" with classic showmanship, while Antonio "Too Sexy" Banderas struts about as a narrating Che. Attendees don't need to be versed in anything more than the film's famous plea, but be prepared to feel overdramatic by osmosis. Andrew Lloyd Webber would be proud.

Other Options

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Artists have always fretted over the tension between creativity and commerce. Exhibit 1: at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s Brechtian tract on marriage and labor, Tout Va Bien, a man signs the very checks that fund the film. Eyebeam’s latest exhibition, Other Options, co-opts this breach of the audience-artist contract to explore the triumphs and travails of securing support for artistic endeavors, from both businesses and the not-for-profit sector. The bottom-line: a series of revelatory projects from artists like Forays, Material Exchange, and Joanna Spitzner confronts the artistic compromises sometimes embedded in these organization-bound agreements.

Halloween: Rosemary's Baby

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Our city crawls with boy-cut odes to Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby. In a stroke of inspired programming, Film Forum screens the actress' dad-may-be-the-devil classic for All Saint's Day spooks. Farrow, of course, stars as Rosemary, the wide-eyed half of a seemingly ideal couple living in the legendary Dakota building. John Cassavetes plays her struggling-actor spouse who, to attain fame on Broadway, makes a Faustian deal using his wife as the booty. From the film's opening lugubrious lullaby, Roman Polanski creates an eerie world in which coded old-world portents appear at every turn. The Polish auteur cranks up the dread and paranoia until you're left with the unsettling feeling that you can't trust anyone.

Drink-N-Draw

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Thanks to the ever-playful folks at 3rd Ward, nudity and inebriation combine to deliver an uncommon cure for the midweek blues. Every other Wednesday, the BK artist co-op pencils in Drink-N-Draw, a laid-back affair at which a model poses for a group of plastered Picassos. Even if your anatomical scribbles look more like tic-tac-toe, the free beer eases the pain of loosing your inner artiste. Bring your drawing tools and — to get more bang for your buck — a friend for a wild evening that makes good on the age-old expression "the more, the merrier."

A Timeless Piece

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"The 'Routefinder'- a wristwatch-like device from the 1920s that offered simple route and mileage information for drivers in the UK.  The analog navigation system allowed users to slot in interchangeable map scrolls that corresponded with different routes which they could physically scroll through as they journeyed on." 

The E.V.E. Project

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Artist Nate Hill doesn't mince words — but materials are a different matter. Tonight, the self-anointed G.O.A.T and God (of his own universe) unleashes his latest creation, the E.V.E. (Earthly View of Eden) Project — a female-body replica pieced together from (gulp) raw animal parts. The counterpart to the A.D.A.M. (A Dead Animal Man) Project, for which Hill similarly culled and patched choice ends from 13 species (i.e. cow, deer, eel, lobster, and shark), E.V.E. promises to be an object that reappears in a gasping nightmare or an inspired diorama for a primeval, indigenous people. To either end, the latter-day Frankenstein has produced a perfect, visceral embodiment of this heebie-jeebies holiday.

A Night at the Office

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Cubicle-loads of run-of-the-mill office situations have been repackaged into laugh-out-loud entertainment recently — from monkey-as-moneymaker commercials to the caricatures of Dilbert, from The Office to Office Space. This evening's incarnation of Symphony Space's literature-in-performance series spotlights three authors who capture water-cooler politics with cool, refreshing prose. Humorous fictional accounts from the hosanna-heavy trio of T.C. Boyle, Joshua Ferris, and Lydia Davis are brought to life by Stephen Colbert, This American Life contributor David Rakoff, and Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi. With these senior personnel on hand, the nine-to-five barbs expound on the night's theme, "Satire," with all the vigor of an SAT essay.

Bike Shorts

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Tonight, Manhattan alt-energy axis Solar 1 hosts the seventh go-around of Bike Shorts. Planted alongside the whirligig that is FDR Drive, the environmental venue is the perfect oasis-in-the-desert to lure the ten-speeds and fixed-gears over bridges for the first time — the previous six powwows went down in Brooklyn. With its call to cameras, the series offers cycle-centered moving pictures that are made by riders and voted on, with appropriate egalitarianism, by an enthusiastic audience. Come to kvetch about automotive etiquette or to take a picturesque water break by the East River.

Lola Montes

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With the recent spate of restorations, it was only a matter of patience before Max Ophüls' winsome swan song, Lola Montes, netted a touch-up. In this many-hued CinemaScope masterpiece, French sexpot Martine Carol slips into a cabaret-dancer's corset — one unfastened by the likes of Alexandre Dumas, Franz Liszt, and King Ludwig of Bavaria. Ophüls uses the circus (emceed by an exploitative Peter Ustinov) and its anything-goes atmosphere to segue into Lola's many romantic flashbacks — each set apart by Archers-style color schemes. Throughout the beautifully detailed tableaux, Ophüls' acrobatic camera paints Lola's riches-to-rags trajectory, giving the whole affair a majestic gloom.

Canyon Cinema

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The late Bruce Conner was an art star who, like Pluto or Saul Bass, defied classification. A pioneer of collage filmmaking, Conner made towering pieces out of the bric-a-brac he found in curbside crates (broken dolls, jewelry, fur) and fabricated conceptual pranks like his Artforum step-by-step on sandwich making. During the free-thinking '60s, the beatnik and his Bay Area coterie began a film collective that eventually evolved into Canyon Cinema, today's preeminent experimental-film institution. Tonight, author Scott MacDonald signs copies of his book Canyon Cinema and introduces a slate of Conner's shorts alongside radical works from Robert Nelson, Chick Strand, and Bruce Baillie.

Mafioso & Lo Scopone Scientifico

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Director Alberto Lattuada is too often the odd man out in film appreciation's musical-chairs shuffling, but the mid-century maestro's satirical gifts sing — like a canary — in the black comedy Mafioso. Made a decade before Coppola's legendary Cosa Nostra chronicle, the bittersweet film stars ace-in-the-hole Alberto Sordi as a Sicilian auto-factory foreman who heads home with his family. After a picturesque, Visit-Sicily sequence and other small-town episodes, the local godfather enlists his carefree compatriot to deliver a message to New York. Despite cheap laughs (hirsute sisters, hormonal yokels), Sordi's lovable everyman enchants as he navigates Sicily's unspoken familial and cultural codes. Meanwhile, Lo Scopone Scientifico features Sordi in a rich-and-poor farce surrounding the irresistible Italian card game.