A spare and gorgeous sound installation by the do-all composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Glacier is just one of the many highlights at the Drop. Held beneath and surrounding the High Line, this all-day festival is a lodestone of art, music, and fashion with a simple mission: to open perspectives and foster collaboration. Several artists participate in a live-painting performance, while Art for Progress uses recycled materials and shouted input to create fashion. There's also curated DJ sets, food trucks, $2 brews from Beerlao, and 2012+, a special exhibition that looks to and beyond that red-letter date of metamorphosis with work by Yoko Ono, DJ Spooky, Mamoru Oshii, and nearly 30 others.
?uestlove drumming the melodies of TheWizard of Oz may sound like a dreamed-up scenario, but he and the folks at Netflix make it a varicolored reality to mark the classic's 70th anniversary. Jennifer Hudson and Julianne Hough appear onstage to belt out R&B and country renditions of the film's familiar, anthemic tunes, before an outdoor screening of Dorothy's historic odyssey. It all makes for a joyous occasion that only props up our city-proud claim: there's no place like New York.
Last year, Abu Dhabi bought up 90% of the Chrysler Building, an asterisk on any architectural map of New York. It's an economic symptom that Exit Art explores in this topical and instructive exhibition about our country's dip-and-dive finances, dependence on bailouts from abroad, and future welfare. Conceived by artist Papo Colo, America for Sale addresses our financial straits and associated politics through a variety of projects in photography, sculpture, and video — not to mention the Institute for Aesthetic Research, a weekly program of cultural-political events and chats.
From Marilyn Monroe's airy delivery to the liberal antics of on-the-lam musicians Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, Billy Wilder's 1959 comedy remains a breathless, cross-dressed romp. Lemmon and Curtis slip into heels, dresses, and the names "Daphne" and "Josephine" after eying the St. Valentine's Day Massacre — the first of many mix-ups in the arch script. Going incognito with Marilyn's all-girl band, the two spend the innuendo-loaded run-time eluding the mob, rich suitors, and male impulses. During the charade, Curtis does a priceless Cary Grant impression and Lemmon's exuberance results in laughs that echo he-she-he-she.
My published Flavorwire post: Tonight, the 47th NYFF opens its grand lineup with Wild Grass, a rapturous flight of fancy by 87-year-old French master Alain Resnais. Venerated the world over for his deconstructive, narrative-be-damned opuses Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais’ latest tale of romantic obsession is based on Christian Gailly’s novel The Incident, but takes off on the inspiriting belief that “after the cinema, nothing surprises you. Everything is possible.” And, oui, he directs with such-minded freedom — totally, tenderly, tragically.
The film’s balletically-shot and rather berserk pas de deux between Georges and Marguerite (André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma, fantastic in whatever tonal key) commences innocently enough: middle-aged and happily married on the surface, Georges discovers the single white dentist’s wallet and, after perusing its contents and enduring a period of do-I-dare over contacting her, he hands the red-colored accessory over to the police. But her ID and pilot-license photographs — one sad, the other oh la la — strike an emergent desire: to flee from that typical French ennui and into her unknown arms.
So he becomes a man completely unhinged by amour fou: calling incessantly like a sitcom creep, writing one-way epistles about his childhood and lifelong affection for planes, and even slashing the tires of her yellow sports car as only the psychotic would. You’d expect her to go Earhart at this point, but mercury must be in retrograde since Marguerite turns from stalked to stalker after meeting Georges outside a cinema that screens The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a 1954 Korean War vehicle for William Holden and Grace Kelly.
From here, the neon-hued narrative ambles onward, continuing to beguile with its impulsive but playful formal shifts — from mischievous romance to hearts-on-fire thriller, screwball comedy to pseudo horror (”you’re hurting me” becomes a chorus accompanied by the drill sounds of a flustered Marguerite) — until what should prove to be the most WTF (What the…French?) ending of the festival.
Speaking of jilted inamoratas, Marco Bellocchio’s breathtaking Vincere provides Ida Dalser — allegedly Mussolini’s first wife and the mother of Benito Junior — the voice and vitality that Il Duce took when he buried her and heir in separate asylums to die anonymously. In this full-bore cri de coeur for the missus, and thus the countless others erased in the annals of veni-vidi-viti history, Bellocchio depicts her as a feisty, resolute, and somewhat delusional woman rather than some haloed Madonna, one seared into our memory by Giovanna Mezzogiorno’s impassioned performance. She’s found the role of a lifetime and seizes upon it with hands, feet, teeth, and soul.
To relate this torn-out chapter and to assert cinema’s ability to provide an alternative story to black-and-white history, Bellocchio contextualizes his fiction with actual propaganda newsreels and declamatory texts that nearly fly into your eye. The hurly-burly first half is “polyexpressive” in this manner — an idea that the futurists outlined in their speed-driven manifesto — the headlong courtship between Ida and a young, ambitious, but still idealistic Mussolini made to parallel the countrywide hysteria for war and, soon enough, fascism.
The quieter second half, after Ida has been melodramatically cast aside for a new signora, focuses on her struggle to reunite with her son and for recognition by the man for whom she sacrificed her life. By this point, Mussolini is no longer the flesh and blood of Filippo Timi (who creases his forehead as if he were trying to fold the face into a history book), instead replaced by the gesticulating dictator, cast in a new focus. The image may be immutable, but the evil that men do lives after them.
Takiji Kobayashi’s 1929 novel about proletariat exploited on the high seas, Kanikosen (”Crab Factory Ship”) has received a prolonged afterlife in Japan thanks to the dire economic sitch for its young and underemployed. In 2006 came the manga and now comes the mangled film adaptation by pomo ironist Sabu. It’s not the stylistic anachronisms such as t-shirts and J-pop hair that do the film in. Nor is it the absurd and fairly humorous flashbacks and flashfowards in which the overworked “cogs of various shape and size” imagine an afterlife in which they bump around a volleyball and giggle like schoolgirls. And it’s certainly not the palpable grime of the mackinaw-clad men as they labor (and get brow-/body- beaten) on an assembly-line of gears and conveyor belts that’s reminiscent of Modern Times — the best moment in the film features a worker pantomiming a crustacean à la Chaplin.
It’s the discourse, comrades, that gets your goat: it’s tedious and simplistic, the characters tossing platitudes like “this is hell” and feel-good slogans like “if you think you can, you can do it” for nearly two hours. At that, the central conflict between ringleader Shinjo (Ryuhei Matsuda) and coolly brutal foreman Asakawa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) feels more like two handsome dudes posturing rather than engaging in a pointed, ideological conflict. In short, the film never knows what it wants to be (seriocomic? seriously comic?) and thus never coheres into the cinematic manifesto it sets out to be.
My published Flavorwire post: It has been a little over a year since the ineffable David Foster Wallace left us for the hereafter. Ululate if you must. Of course, his spirit lives on through his ruminative, pomo oeuvre — death, as e.e. cummings poeticized, is “no parenthesis.” In fact, the dark, surging, circumlocutory monologues in Wallace’s 1999 short-story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, inspired John Krasinski (yes, he of The Office stardom) to adapt them for his behind-the-camera debut of the same name.
Much of the film’s winding dialogue is taken from the tome’s confessional and oft-despicable male ids, though obviously pared down and occasionally placed in a format outside of the sit-down interview (i.e. dinner parties). Alas, the dense, ambitious translation hews too closely to the source’s hopscotch style; it’s compelling here and there with flashes of aha! honesty, but it mostly comes off as head-scratching.
When Interviews was first released, Krasinski was still a theater student at Brown. While there, he partook in a staged reading — according to the actor, this performance sold him on his future métier. His chief edit to the material turns its “offscreen” interrogator into Sara (Julianne Nicholson), a recently-dumped graduate student who seeks to learn more about the male species and their impulses, even declaring that she doesn’t think that “the truth about men can be found in a book.” Fair enough. She conducts numerous tell-all interviews with men about their dealings with the opposite sex, or — in line with the academic milieu of the film — attempts to lay bare the impact of the feminist movement on today’s male. In abstract, an interesting way to use Wallace’s lines as “evidence;” in practice, the daring is all head and little heart.
Like lab samples, the interviewees themselves are identified by subject numbers. Indeed, the cell in which they’re interrogated is more concrete dungeon than ivory tower. Or, if you will, an outsized petri dish to observe variation and behavior: the first dude — much to his chagrin — ejaculates “Victory for the forces of democratic freedom!” during his climactic flourish; the next uses his deformed limb to guilt-trip women into bed; yet another splits with five different women using the same excuse, like some sort of customer service asshole; and the un-saintly keep marching in for diminishing returns. Spaced out with jump cuts, we don’t hear the questions posed during these interviews, although they’re encoded in the lengthy, self-justifying responses, some that hint at those typical Wallace motifs of alienation and desperation. Yet, with the static camera, we’re also too aware of the “act” being caught, as if each man was auditioning for a theatrical role as Stanley Kowalski by baring their sexual hang-ups.
Once in the outside world — at the aforementioned dinner parties, the café, even at home — Sara’s grandiose “What is Man?” dossier takes in conversational encounters with a student fixated on his grisly essay thesis (Dominic Cooper), her thoughtful professor/mentor (Timothy Hutton), and, at long last, her snide ex-boyfriend (Krasinski). Even overheard exchanges, such as a switchback tale about an airport pick-up being discussed by Christopher Meloni and Denis O’Hare, take on heightened significance to her.
Krasinski frees Wallace’s prose from its undisclosed setting with these apt and clever relocations, but he’s much less successful with the two-headed Greek chorus (Max Minghella and Lou Taylor Pucci) that swaggers about their scenes, blathering about female desires for naught. At that, the use of recognizable faces — like Will Arnett and Ben Gibbard — allows for a few guffaws, but detracts from anything incisive. But the core problem is the sad-eyed Sara: invented by the filmmaker to be the narrative’s hub and the raison d’être for the no-prisoners investigation of this XY-psyche (the book left the impetus open-ended), she remains too half-drawn (or withdrawn) a character, a red-headed placeholder rather than the flesh-and-blood protagonist needed to tie the brief, floating ideas and observations into a cohesive wallop. In the end, it has to be said that the truth of men can’t be found in this film either.
Jean Cocteau once said that, “In Paris everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.” Yet, in writer/director Cédric Klapisch’s latest ensemble film, Paris, a dancer (Romain Duris) afflicted with a failing heart discovers the vicarious solace of the gaze, Rear Window-style. When his concerned social-worker sister (Juliette Binoche) moves in with her three children to care for him during the wait for a heart transplant, he sums up his passing days with a simple phrase: “I watch other people live.” Through this prism of mortality, Klapisch explores his luminous hometown with affection and with what one character describes as a “curiosity for heritage,” offering vignettes that come to life across the postcard-ready arrondissements.
Last week, we sat down with the jovial director and the uber-busy actress (BAM is currently presenting In-I, her dance collaboration with British choreographer Akram Khan, and the French Embassy is exhibiting In-Eyes, a collection of her portraits and poetry). Veering from the omnibus route of Paris Je T’aime, Klapisch’s pop valentine plaits together his insider “ideas about the city.” Klapisch explained that “the principle of [Paris Je T'aime] is that you have different visions of the city. In this, it’s my vision, which is multiple. But it’s still one person looking at rich people, poor people, young people, old people.”
It’s an all-in-one attitude that hallmarks Klapisch’s melancholic/comedic films, like his most famous stateside releases L’Auberge Espagnole and its sequel, Russian Dolls. The director culls his characters from each social stratum: a chatty boulangerie owner (Karin Viard) who proves to be a touch xenophobic; a team of Rungis’ market traders, one smitten with the lonely Binoche (Albert Dupontel); a Cameroon native (Kingsley Kum Abang) who makes the illegal trek to Paris to find l’amour with a fashion model (Audrey Marnay); a bourgeois architect (François Cluzet) who endures a strange, computerized nightmare about pratfalls of urban planning; and his brother (Fabrice Luchini in comic relief), a professor of Parisian history who becomes infatuated with a fetching student (Mélanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds) and texts her stanzas of Baudelaire along with deal-sealers like “U R awesome. I’m 2 hot 4 U.”
Many of these characters suffer from a dissatisfaction with their lives as is, but Klapisch insists that it’s a Parisian trait. “That’s what [Duris] says in the taxi, that people whine a lot, complain all the time, they’re not happy about everything. I can see that in a positive way. Everything historical about Paris deals with revolt, being revolted. So in 1789, that’s what happened. In 1968, that’s what happened. For me, it deals with the same thing: the fact that we don’t accept things as they are. It’s a good thing and bad thing.”
Despite the “network of interconnections” that occurs during the shuffled plot, the strongest — unsurprisingly — is between brother and sister. “It was refreshing to explore this kind of relationship,” confessed Binoche, who drew on experiences with her own sister and half-brother. “Because I’ve been into, you know, lovers’ relationships and [relationships] with children. Somehow, because it’s not getting physical, you can get very, very close. It’s learning to love in a different way.”
Klapisch lauds the gusto that the acclaimed actress brought to the role. “The first scene that we made together — the three of us — was when [Duris] says he’s sick to his sister. Instead of being compassionate, she’s mad at him. While she had to be angry to show her love, that was very tricky because it’s a very strange way to react. But I think that really gave the right emotions about the fact that, between a brother and sister, it’s not really logical.”
With her proximity to death, Binoche’s straitlaced character eventually undergoes a heartfelt change by the film’s end, resulting in a memorable striptease. “Just thinking of Rita Hayworth,” she joked. “I didn’t see it as an outsider, I just had fun with it. It’s about the complicity with the man. More than being sexy or not sexy is to make him laugh.”
The city itself, of course, has the title role and although lensed for the nth time, it remains as picturesque and monumental as ever. That’s not to say that clichés are absent; after all, it’s a film that begins up in the Eiffel Tower. But Klapisch actually seeks them out to “incorporate them into something that, in the end, is not cliché anymore.” He acknowledges that “clichés are part of life,” if not essential to it. In this case, the director does a cinematic wink-wink by having his camera pan back to reveal an onscreen camera. As it turns out, the most popular of sites are being shot for a tourism-board DVD with the professor — split like many a Parisian between a fear of the sterile future and a static cling to the past — as the anxious guide.
Klapisch himself had the support of local authorities. “I talked with the main office, the police department, and the mayor’s office at the beginning saying, ‘Okay, my movie is going to be called Paris…’ So I told them because of that, try to work with me instead of working against me. And it did work, because for many scenes it really helped to have them on my side.”
For both, Paris represents yet another chance to shoot in the beloved French capital. Binoche has made countless films set there, from her last film, Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, to Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, and on back to her early films with enfant terrible Leos Carax. But the city is rapidly changing. “The Mayor [Bertrand Delanoe] is changing the city pretty amazingly. Now the cars are less and less because you can’t park, you’re stuck in traffic, you have just one road instead of three because of buses and green space. In a way, it’s changing its face. And I hope it’s going to change people’s humor.”
Klapisch adds, “I think that French people opened up much more because they traveled more, learned more, studied other languages. I’m pretty optimistic that they have a different attitude towards foreigners because of that. I think people are cooler than they were ten years ago. You can see that in the coffee shops, it’s less uptight than before.”
Binoche even offers a tip for visitors who fear the famed Parisian snootiness. “You can transform people very easily if you don’t get stuck on ‘oh he hasn’t smiled so he’s my enemy.’ If you smile, you may have a smile in return. It’s actually fun to see who you’re going to get.”
My published Flavorwire post: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life imagined a hereafter in which the dearly departed face a profound order: single out a favorite memory to retain for eternity, with the rest left to the ether. Memory is one of the acclaimed Japanese director’s obsessions, along with loss and what happens to those left in that wake. Whether Maborosi’s disconcerted widow or the young brood abandoned in a Tokyo apartment by their mother in Nobody Knows, Kore-eda’s characters are vulnerable but never exploited. Quite the contrary: he treats each lived-in presence with an empathy that traces back to his earlier years of lensing humanistic documentaries for Japanese TV.
Kore-eda’s sixth feature, Still Walking (now in limited release) chronicles the fraught, day-long reunion of the Yokoyama family. They gather to honor the 15th anniversary of the eldest son’s passing, but his outsized memory and being together causes long-standing resentments and regrets to come home. The film is quiet, elegiac, and full of such tactile life that it evokes one’s own familial memories. We met with Kore-eda (and his translator) during the Tribeca Film Festival to talk about his latest and to ask him about his best-loved memory.
Flavorpill: What makes the Yokoyamas such a relatable family?
Hirokazu Kore-eda: My intention was to portray my own family. What I wanted to portray with the character of the mother was the idea that you don’t say bad things to people to their face. You wait until they leave the room and you say things behind their back. It’s a principle for her, her philosophy. It’s not limited to just my mother. It’s common to all Japanese people to go through life avoiding confrontation. It’s a certain kind of wisdom, a way to survive, to keep a family going. So I thought that I was portraying a very domestic, very Japanese home life and that it would be received by other cultures as incomprehensible and that the [West] would criticize this as not pursuing growth. But, people in France, Spain, New York, and Toronto — everyone says it reminds them of their family. I’m actually very surprised that Western audiences would perceive it as similar.
FP: That personal correlation might be due to the film’s structure. It’s composed of warm, representative moments which — come the credits — echo as shared memories between the family and the audience. Why did you limit your family portrait to 24 hours instead of, say, a weekend?
HK: This is a script I wrote right after my mother passed away. If you focus on a longer period, you end up portraying the process of aging, the process of death. It necessarily becomes much more sentimental — and a little bit schmaltzy. That’s something I really wanted to avoid. I wanted to strike a single moment where the mother is still very active and strong.
FP: In Distance, the characters gather on the third anniversary of Japan’s Ark of Truth tragedy. In Still Walking, the family reunites on 15 years after Junpei’s death. What power or resonance do anniversaries hold?
HK: To gather a family at their parent’s house after they become adults… it’s really only on the Day of the Dead, the Obon festival, and New Year’s. It’s almost necessary to choose a day like that in order to gather the family. The anniversary of someone’s death, that’s a day where, even if it’s someone you may have forgotten about in your daily life, you really feel much closer to their presence. I wanted to portray the differences and discrepancies between the various family members in their relationship and how they remember the dead.
FP: In your films, a key figure is often missing. What is it about absence — and memory — that lures you with such singularity and regularity?
HK: These are themes I do like, but I’m not conscientiously focusing on them. As a child, my hobby was archeology. I’d leave school, get on my bike with my little shovel, and head out to a place where there were old pots and old ceramic pieces left behind. I’d dig by myself and get really excited when I found a small piece of an old pot. Then I’d take it home and clean it off with a toothbrush. These are pieces I still treasure and keep, and they still decorate my office today. I think I was always really fascinated by things that are left behind, imagining what was there.
FP: The acting, as usual, seems so organic. How scripted was the film?
HK: There’s almost no improvisation in the film; it’s exactly according to a written script. If there’s a line that needs to be spoken, for example, during the time that the mother crosses from the kitchen into the living room, but the physical distance prevents this whole line from being spoken, then we would revise the writing to make it fit. We did a lot of that before we started shooting.
FP: There are the signs of age throughout the house, least of all on the parents themselves. For instance, Hiroshi Abe’s character notices a bar support near the bathtub. Is this why you made him an art restorer?
HK: Most doctors want their children to become doctors. If they have an eldest son, the eldest son will become a doctor and the second son will often go into music, art, or movie-making. I wanted his character to have gone to art school, but he’s not quite talented enough to be a painter so he settles into the profession of being an art restorer. Like doctors repair people, restorers fix works of art. I wanted there to be something — even if it’s not quite the same — that reflected each other.
FP: With the unhurried pace of your films, which often feature moments of atmospheric and docudramatic observation, how important is it for you to be your own editor?
HK: The rhythm of the film which you’re experiencing as a viewer, it definitely comes out of me writing a script, then directing it, and then editing it myself. I think it’s a very important part of the process to create that pace.
FP: Imagine that you’re a character from After Life. If you had to choose one cinematic memory, what would it be?
HK: There used to be a great art-house film theatre in Ginza that I’d go to when I was cutting classes in college. I would just hang out there and see movies. When I went, there’d be a lot of office workers, a lot of salarymen who played hooky from work, some taking naps in the theatre. But most watched a lot of movies.
There was one instance — in the spring of my 19th year — when they screened Kurosawa’s Ikiru. At the end of this film, everybody in the theatre stood up and clapped. There were no actors, no directors — nobody was there to be clapped for. I understand that you’d clap at the end of a play or a live show, but for a film, this was a really new experience for me. Everybody there, they really weren’t expecting this. They were just looking for a place to leave their responsibilities. I think they really enjoyed this movie from the bottom of their heart. That was the moment when I realized that film is really powerful, that film is amazing. And I think that experience strongly influenced my decision to not become a novelist, but to make films.
If you've ever wanted to learn the Charleston and have a legit occasion to perform those lithe steps, head to the fourth edition of this classy lollapalooza. Hosted by the ever-dapper Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orchestra, today's festivities bring Fitzgerald's heyday to roaring (but family-friendly) life. The band's period melodies set the mood for the vintage-clad to dance, take portraits, rumble around the island in a 1920s motorcar, and imbibe elderflower concoctions by sponsor St-Germain Liqueur. There's also BBQ, a pie-recipe contest, a parade of vintage hats and swimsuits, and traditional games like tug-of-war.
For his follow-up to In Search of Mozart, British documentarian Phil Grabsky crafts an absorbing portrait of our old friend Ludwig Van using the composer's sublime works as chronological signposts. Musicians and critics dish information and insights about the solitary, furrowed-brow genius, but it's the 50-plus performances of his epochal compositions that leave the spectator thunderstruck. Grabsky recorded across Europe and North America, capturing a lineup that includes Frans Brüggen, Sir Roger Norrington, Gianandrea Noseda, and other luminaries. Here's to In Search of Mahler for the near future.
Poets House cuts the proverbial ribbon on its new BPC palace and invites the verse-appreciating public to come explore this lovely coastal space and the 50,000-plus volumes of poetry it houses. Billy Collins, the former US Poet Laureate, appears for an inaugurating reading, while neighbors Zucker's Bagels and Pan Latin Cafe supply the refreshments. Come back on Saturday for Invocation of the Muse, which features a poetry-inspired set by Natalie Merchant and readings by Collins, Mark Doty, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and an anthology of others.
A 1968 short by Edward English, Spaceways percolates with the cosmic force of Sun Ra and his Arkestra. One of four musical portraits to screen tonight, it provides a chance to hear Ra's idiolect and to see footage of the era's protests alongside the band's run-through for Carnegie at his East 3rd Street space. Pete and Toshi Seeger become ethno-musicologists for The Singing Fishermen of Ghana and Les Blank gets a double feature with Cigarette Blues and Christopher Tree, the latter recording a virtuosic freestyle by an one-man orchestra out in the wilds.
Basically unseen in the US, the documentaries of Beck Cole offer a telescoped look at Australia's historically cast-aside population: the Aboriginal people. A member of the Warramung and Luritja nations, Cole arrives tonight to screen records of Indigenous life and to discuss her for-the-people efforts with compatriot Warwick Thornton and NYU director Faye Ginsburg. Besides Making Samson and Delilah (a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Aboriginal teens who headline Thornton's Camera d'Or-winning film) and The Lore of Love (a coming-of-age tale in the hinterlands) is A Fair Deal for a Dark Race, which focuses on the Indigenous crusade for citizenship as part of the much-lauded history series, First Australians.
Co-presenters of the "from Holland, with love" that is the New Island Festival, FIGMENT turns its City of Dreams — a verdant space full of interactive art, large-scale sculptures, and miniature golf — into this weekend's getaway for stacked, free-for-all parties. Get thee to the ferry on Saturday as the alt-collective Blackkat sounds out the party beat with DJs exploring dub, techno, electronics, and the break. Underground organizer Rhiannon curates a Sunday program with an ear to the soil, unearthing music inspired by these shores, from indigenous rhythms to that infectious, old-school hip-hop back-beat.
"How'd you like to wake up in the morning and be him?" slurs delusional prizefighter Stacy Keach in this late-career tour de force by John Huston, the auteur of life on the ropes. Keach is astounding as the pauper to young Jeff Bridges' aspiring prince in Stockton's minor-league boxing scene, and we're bystanders to a sobering enactment of fact: one must go down for one to go up. A wheezy boozehound played to the desperate hilt by Susan Tyrrell heads a fabulous supporting cast, as master DP Conrad Hall lenses a coulda-been-a-contenda descent that's only decelerated by the murky promise of a comeback.
Similar in spirit to Phyllis Johnson's Aspen — a multimedia magazine from the '60s with a table of contents that ranged from phonograph recordings to postcards — TheThing is a wondrous, SF-based periodical enlisting writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists to make objects that feature text in idiosyncratic ways, such as Miranda July's written-on window shade. For the seventh issue, author Jonathan Lethem constructed the "Chaldron Optical System," a pair of black-framed specs with the text inscribed on its arms. Packaged with a booklet called "Twelve Statements About Chaldrons," the objet d'art ties in with his forthcoming novel, Chronic City. Tonight, Lethem signs editions at NYC's bastion for artist-made titles.
33-45-78: Those measurements cause some guys and gals to lose themselves. This Saturday, 30 vendors gather beneath the Manhattan Bridge to satisfy even the most voracious vinyl collector. Organized by the Brooklyn Flea, there's plenty of old and new wax to be had with Other Music, DFA Records, Ghostly International, Basement Bhangra, and other respected purveyors on site. Alongside the crates, 15 dealers sell clothing, accessories, and jewelry as part of the Vintage Fashion Bazaar — the Flea's ode to Fashion Week.
The grito is both Mexican mating call and battle cry — the most famous being a heartfelt bellow of "Viva Mexico!" Tonight, NachosNY presents this jubilant celebration for Mexico's Independence Day offers free FoodShouldTasteGood chips and Lobo Park Slope salsa, cheap Tecate and Modelo, music by Spicy Times' Jinners and Nora, and a grito contest in which applause is boss. If throaty mating calls aren't your forte, there's a raffle for other spoils like gift certificates and a mini-fridge from Tecate.
If you've ever noshed on tandoori this or biryani that, then you've had a savory entrée into Punjabi cuisine. Tonight, Veronica "Rani" Sidhu celebrates the release of her region-focused cookbook with a tasting, plus a discussion with Naturopathic physician Leat Kuzniar on the many therapeutic perks of the herbs and spices used. Trust Rani: the lady has spent nearly half a century procuring and perfecting her ambrosial recipes while also jotting down anecdotes about the characters she encountered en route. Some bhangra dancing (our fave) closes out the evening.
