Yearly Archives: 2011

MoMA PRESENTS: JOHN AKOMFRAH’S THE NINE MUSES

THE NINE MUSES is an elegiac look at the journey and the immigrant experience

THE NINE MUSES (John Akomfrah, 2011)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-12
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.icarusfilms.com

Making ingenious use of footage previously shot for other projects, Ghana-born British filmmaker John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses is a beautiful, elegiac poem about migration and journey, both physical and metaphysical. “Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home” reads a quote from Matsuo Bashō, one of many excerpts that show up as onscreen intertitles or are read by offscreen voices. Divided into sections devoted to the nine muses born to Zeus and Mnemosyne, including Clio (muse of history), Euterpe (muse of music), Melpomene (muse of tragedy), and Thalia (muse of comedy), the film cuts back and forth between footage of men working in a hellish underground foundry, an angry Akomfrah lying down along a waterfront, staring directly into the camera accusatorily, and stunning shots of a vast Alaskan landscape of sea, sky, and mountains with one of a pair of characters in brightly colored parkas looking out at the wide, almost blindingly white expanse. (Composer Trevor Mathison is the Yellow Man, David Lawson the Blue Man). Akomfrah, who cofounded the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, adds in archival black-and-white film of Africans and Indians arriving on the shore of a post-WWII England while also focusing on various modes of travel, including boats, trains, and planes, poetically edited together by Miikka Leskinen to capture intriguing aspects of the immigrant experience. The narration features such actors as John Barrymore, Richard Burton, Alex Jennings, and Jim Norton reading from such plays and novels as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s The Odyssey, William Shakespeare’s Richard II and Twelfth Night, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and Molloy, Oedipus’s Sophocles, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with interlude poems by Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Kahlil Gibron, Countee Cullen, William Blake, and Zelda Fitzgerald. There are several live performances, with Leontyne Price singing “Motherless Child” and Paul Robeson singing “Let My People Go”; the score also features music by Arvo Pärt and the Gundecha Brothers. A self-described “Proustian” odyssey, The Nine Muses is a fascinating hybrid of sound and vision, of history and memory, that will be playing October 6-12 at MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater; the October 8 screening at 4:30 will be introduced by Akomfrah and followed by a discussion moderated by Sally Berger.

BARNEYS NEW YORK: CARINE’S WORLD

The windows at Barneys New York honor fashion icon Carine Roitfeld with the multimedia display “Carine’s World” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Barneys New York
660 Madison Ave. at East 61st St.
212-826-8900
www.thewindow.barneys.com

From 2001 to January 2011, former fashion model Carine Roitfeld was the editor in chief of French Vogue, and this month she is releasing Irreverent (Rizzoli, October 18, 2011, $100), a deluxe photo album that looks back at her thirty years in the business. Barneys New York is paying tribute to the fashion icon by making her a central part of their fall campaign, including dedicating its famous windows to a flashy multimedia display that features Roitfeld talking about herself and style in general, with videos of her and her two children, Vladimir and Julia, on the move in this fast-paced culture. “Carine’s World,” which was conceptualized by Dennis Freedman, shot by Mario Testino, and designed by Patten Studio, offers lots to see, whether you care about fashion or not, particularly the Water Window, which involves complex gadgetry that, like much of fashion, is very cool to look at but doesn’t really seem to serve much purpose in the real world.

ART SPIEGELMAN — METAMAUS: IN CONVERSATION WITH HILLARY CHUTE

92nd St. Y Unterberg Poetry Center
1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, October 6, $27, 8:00
212-415-5500
www.92y.org

Twenty-five years ago, Art Spiegelman revolutionized the comic book industry, as well as Holocaust literature, with the first volume of his epic Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History, followed six years later by And Here My Troubles Began, earning him a special Pulitzer Prize. In celebration of the book’s silver anniversary, the cofounder of the heavily influential Raw magazine (which he edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly) has released the spectacular MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, October 4, 2011, $35), which consists of pages from notebooks, sketches, grids, research paraphernalia, photos, letters, family trees, a lengthy transcript of the 1972 interview with his father that formed the basis of Maus’s tale of Vladek’s struggle to survive in Auschwitz during WWII, and much more, filled with fascinating personal insight. “It was hard to revisit Maus, the book that both ‘made’ me and has haunted me ever since; hard to revisit the ghosts of my family, the death-stench of history, and my own past,” Spiegelman writes in the book’s acknowledgment to editor Hillary Chute, whose interviews with Spiegelman are found throughout such chapters as “Why the Holocaust?,” “Why Mice?,” and “Why Comics?” Chute also talks to Mouly and their children, Nadja and Dash, examining the Maus phenomenon from every angle. In addition, the full-color hardcover is accompanied by a CD that contains rough drafts, videos, interviews, the complete Maus strips, a tour of Auschwitz, and other odds and ends relating to the unforgettable story. “I didn’t know that I did want to do a book about the Holocaust,” Spiegelman explains early on. “If anything, I was in allergic reaction to my own Jewishness. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to talk about it as self-hating (even though some people were angry at Maus for my lack of Zionist zeal), but when I was a kid I wasn’t sure being Jewish was such a great idea — I’d heard they killed people for that. Maus somehow involved coming out of the closet as a Jew.” Spiegelman will discuss all that and more at the 92nd St. Y on October 6 when he sits down with Chute for a conversation about the history of Maus, one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.

ART IN ODD PLACES: RITUAL

May Ivy Martin will offer “Tree Kisses” along Fourteenth St. as part of Art in Odd Places festival

CEREMONY. HABITUATION. MYTH. OBSESSION. SUPERSTITION. LITURGY.
14th St. between Ave. C & the Hudson River
Through Monday, October 10
Admission: free
www.artinoddplaces.org

Now in its seventh year, Art in Odd Places lines all of Fourteenth St., from Ave. C in the east to the Hudson River in the west, with site-specific audio and visual installations, interventions, and performance-art projects right on the street. Continuing through October 10, this year’s edition, curated by El Museo del Barrio’s Trinidad Fombella and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art’s Kalia Brooks, focuses on ritual, with works from more than sixty artists exploring the political and the personal, the individual and the community, the religious and the cultural. Scott Andresen’s “Daily Portage,” consisting of quilted detritus, can be found in shop windows between Ave. A & First Ave. Daniel Bejar adds history to subway signage for “Get Lost!” Tom Bogaert will create “Double Portraits” in front of Our Lady of Guadalupe each night from 5:00 to 7:00. Michael Borowski’s “Wash Closely” mobile sink offers passersby the opportunity to cleanse themselves in public. Laurie LeBreton’s “Pilgrimage” features more than three hundred handmade paper figures in the Fourteenth St. Framing Gallery re-creating a Buddhist cave pilgrimage in Laos. On October 6, Lawrence Graham-Brown will perform “Gimme Bak Ma Clothes!,” referencing Thomas Dartmouth Rice of the American Minstrelsy Theater and the Jim Crow laws. From October 7 to 9, Marissa Mickelberg will take a goat for a walk in “Goat Walk.” On October 8, Rob Andrews’s “Union Square Clean” will involve forty people cloaked in black, gathering in the park to have their feet washed by strangers, while a tuxedoed LuLu LoLo will doff her chapeau to you in “A Tip of the Hat on 14th Street.” On Saturday and Sunday, Alexa Hoyer, dressed in traditional Bavarian garb, will shine your shoes and take your picture in Union Square for “Just a German Shoeshine Girl,” while Lois Weaver and Lori E. Seid will hang laundry and tell stories for “Commit an Act of Domestic Terrorism.” And on Sunday, Julia Barbee will walk the length of Fourteenth St. combining prayer, perfume, and poetry for “Before/After Scenting New York.” You might be used to seeing a lot of strange things on Fourteenth St., but be prepared for things to get a whole lot stranger during this fun festival.

DREAM-OVER: A SLEEP-OVER FOR GROWN-UPS

Rubin Museum
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Tickets on sale October 4, $108
Event takes place October 22, 8:00 pm – 9:00 am
www.rmanyc.org/dreamover

The Rubin Museum’s inaugural Dream-over this past March was a unique and wildly successful sleepover party for adults. It’s safe to say that Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files never contained anything quite like this. Complete with bedtime stories, expertly guided discussions of Freudian dream interpretation and imagery, and a night bedded down in front of an artwork specially selected for each dreamer, the event sold out in minutes as adventurous New Yorkers rushed to spend an evening amid the colorful paintings and mystical sculptures of many-armed buddhas, flying sages, and spectacular contemporary photography in the Rubin’s exceptional collections of Himalayan art. It’s no pipe dream that the Dream-over is back; its October 22 reincarnation will be conducted under the guidance of Lama Lhanang Rinpoche, spiritual teacher of the Nyingma Longchen Nying-Thig order of Tibetan Buddhism, and clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. William H. Braun. Lucky participants will engage in an art meditation workshop, discussions of Tibetan Dream Yoga, and Himalayan tales as well as enjoy a midnight snack, Tibetan breakfast, and no contact with the outside world for more than twelve hours. (Turn those cellphones off!) Lucky participants fill out a detailed Dreamlife Questionnaire in advance, then the Rubin decides which artwork each dreamer will snooze under — one that will hopefully influence your brain’s nighttime wanderings. (If you go as a couple, you will both sleep together under one work of art.) Tickets are a bit pricier than in March ($108 vs. $55) and the event may sell out even more quickly, but you’ll instantly know it’s well worth the money and effort when you arrive in nightclothes and with a sleeping bag and bed down under the eyes of hundreds of compassionate buddhas — or a modern photograph of an Indian street, as we did in March — and see just what one’s subconscious turns up.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL NEVER FORGETS: DENNIS ELSAS

Dennis Elsas will take audience on audiovisual ride through his life and career in radio at 92YTribeca

A MULTIMEDIA JOURNEY THROUGH THE PERSONAL ARCHIVES OF DENNIS ELSAS
92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Tuesday, October 4, $18, 7:00
212-415-5500
www.denniselsas.com
www.92y.org

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, WNEW-FM had one of the all-time-great DJ lineups, with such musical stalwarts and wily veterans as Scott Muni, Dave Herman, Vin Scelsa, Pat St. John, Carol Miller, Pete Fornatale, and Dennis Elsas playing a mix of progressive and classic rock, pop, and folk. Elsas, who can currently be heard on SiriusXM Classic Vinyl and WFUV (along with Scelsa’s “Idiot’s Delight” and Fornatale’s “Mixed Bag”) and teaches the Rock Revolution in Music and Media graduate course at Fordham, will be giving a multimedia lecture on October 4 at 92YTribeca, talking about his musical history, from growing up listening to top-40 radio to being part of the progressive FM movement to interviewing living legends. Even if you don’t know him by name, you’ll recognize that soothing voice as soon as you hear it.

NATIONAL ADOPTION REUNION WITH GAVIN DeGRAW

Gavin DeGraw will be hanging out in Central Park with the animals on October 4, looking to set a Guinness World Record

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park
Tuesday, October 4, free, 4:00 – 6:30
www.animalalliancenyc.org
www.gavindegraw.com

Gavin DeGraw isn’t about to let the awful attack he suffered in August in the East Village keep him down. The New York-based singer-songwriter behind such singles as “In Love with a Girl,” “We Belong Together,” and “I Don’t Want to Be” and such albums as Chariot (2003), Free (2009), and his latest, Sweeter (RCA, September 2011), is about to set off on a U.S. tour, but first he’ll be playing a free show October 4 at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. The performance is part of Petco’s National Adoption Reunion, which is attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the Largest Gathering of Adopted Shelter Animals, currently at 250. To participate, just bring your pet (dogs must be on a leash, cats, rabbits, and other animals in a carrier) and proof of adoption from a shelter or rescue organization (the animal cannot have been purchased from a pet store or breeder) to the park at 4:00. There will also be dogs available for adoption on-site. National Adoption Reunion is the centerpiece of the third annual New York Week for the Animals, cosponsored by the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals and which also includes such upcoming events as the New York Audubon Evening Autumn Migration Walk, a birding tour of Bryant Park, the workshop “Trap-Neuter-Return: How to Manage a Feral Cat Colony,” a Dogs Have Angels Too book signing and adoption with Sara Cavallaro, the second annual Anjellicle Cats Rescue Catbaret, the Pup Parade & Blessing of Animals for Veterans, a Creepy Creatures Weekend at the New York Botanical Garden, the second annual 5K Run for the Horses, and other special activities and adoption clinics through October 9.