For nearly five years, Portland Cello Project has been revitalizing cello music, melding pop, rap, heavy metal, classical, movie soundtracks, hardcore, country, folk, experimental, and other genres, playing with just cellos or as part of larger orchestras with wind instruments, brass, percussion, and choirs. On their latest record, Homage, they take on hip-hop, reimagining such songs as Lil Wayne’s “She Will” and “Lollipop,” Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “That’s My Bitch,” “Ni**as in Paris,” and “H*A*M,” Talib Kweli’s “Get By,” and OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” before concluding with Osvaldo Golijov’s operatic “Lua Descolorida.” PCP combines sparkling wit with mad skillz in these highly entertaining songs, part of the group’s mission to show that the cello is much more than just an old-fashioned classical string instrument primarily used in chamber music. Earlier this summer, PCP hosted the two-night Extreme Dance Party in their hometown of Portland, where they teamed up with local friends at the Doug Fir Lounge. On August 22, they’re be bringing their nine-hundred-song repertoire, which also features tunes by Justin Timberlake, Pantera, Arvo Pärt, Britney Spears, and many others, to City Winery, headlining a bill with Brooklyn electroacoustic duo Live Footage.
Yearly Archives: 2012
TICKET GIVEAWAY: SAMSARA
SAMSARA (Ron Fricke, 2011)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, August 24
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.barakasamsara.com
The filmmaking team of director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson have teamed up once again to make the visually stunning documentary Samsara. The follow-up to 1985’s Chronos and 1992’s Baraka, the new work was shot in 70mm across twenty-five countries on five continents over the course of five years, immersing the audience in a barrage of striking imagery, set to a dramatic score by co-composer Michael Stearns. “Samsara was conceived as a nonverbal guided meditation on the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth,” Fricke explains, while Magidson adds, “The hope is that a viewer comes away feeling a sense of connection, a connection to the phenomenon of life around the world at this time.” Samsara, which can be translated as “the ever-turning wheel of life,” is also a personal journey to be experienced individually as it explores such spiritual concepts as flow and impermanence, without voice-overs or intertitles to explain what is happening on-screen.
SAMSARA takes viewers around the world in 70mm
TICKET GIVEAWAY: Samsara opens August 24 at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, and twi-ny is teaming up with the Interdependence Project to give away ten pairs of tickets to see this remarkable film during its opening weekend, at 4:50 and 7:15 on Saturday and Sunday.
Founded by Ethan Nichtern, the IDP is for people interested in exploring their minds on the meditation cushion and applying the insights, clarity, and wisdom developed by meditation to life, especially to the arts, ecology, activism, and community service. The IDP offers various weekly and monthly Buddhism and meditation classes in the East Village as well as workshops and retreats. Classes and workshops are offered by a variety of teachers from the Insight, Shambhala, Tibetan, and Zen traditions.
Just send your name, daytime phone number, all-time favorite nonverbal movie, and preferred showtime to contest@twi-ny.com by Tuesday, August 21, at 5:00 to be eligible. All entrants must be twenty-one years of age or older; ten winners will be selected at random.
OLD JEWS TELLING JOKES
So, Reuben, Nathan, and Bunny are stuck on a desert island . . . (photo by Joan Marcus)
Westside Theatre/Downstairs
407 West 43rd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 13, $80-$95
oldjewstellingjokesonstage.com
“A man goes to see his rabbi and he says, ‘Rabbi, I think my wife is poisoning me. I don’t know what to do.’ The rabbi says, “Well, give me a chance to talk to her and I’ll get back to you.’ So the next day the rabbi calls up the man and he says, ‘Well, I had a long, long talk with your wife. Three hours at least.’ And the man says, ‘Yeah? Yeah? So what’s your advice?’ ‘Take the poison.’” That is just one of the many hysterical jokes, both familiar and not, that populate the hit comedy Old Jews Telling Jokes. Created by writer-editors Peter Gethers (The Cat Who Went to Paris) and Daniel Okrent (inventor of Rotisserie Baseball), the one-hundred-minute show is based on the website Old Jews Telling Jokes, which was developed by Sam Hoffman to give just plain folks, who must be at least sixty years old, the opportunity to tell their favorite joke. On a relatively bare stage with a hanging flat-screen monitor that announces such chronological themes as birth, childhood, marriage, and death, five characters take their turns telling such jokes as “They Made a Talking Doll of My Mother,” “Why I’m Losing Weight,” “I Hate It When He Brings Me Flowers!” and “Daddy, Where Do Babies Come From?” by themselves and in various groupings. Nothing is off-limits as old-timers Morty (Lenny Wolpe), Bunny (Marilyn Sokol), and Nathan (Todd Susman) and youngsters Reuben (Bill Army) and Debbi (Audrey Lynn Weston) take on love and sex, doctors and health, friendship and religion, often getting dirtier and raunchier than one might expect. In addition, each character has a solo spot to talk about their own life, occasionally turning serious for a moment before going back to the jokes, along with a song or two accompanied by pianist Donald Corren.
Lenny Wolpe, Bill Army, and Todd Susman don cowboy hats to share a funny tale in OLD JEWS TELLING JOKES (photo by Joam Marcus)
Wolpe displays a soft, tender side as the ersatz leader of the gang, with TV veteran Susman lending an engaging subtlety to the proceedings, a necessary balance to Sokol’s awkward overemoting, while Weston and token goy Army chime in well under Marc Bruni’s direction. Expect the cast to crack one another up several times as they tell their jokes, clearly having a load of fun themselves. One of the many great little touches includes a few chairs that are occasionally brought onstage, covered in clear plastic just as our aunt Sylvia liked it. Don’t misinterpret the title — although there is lots of Yiddish to go around and a distinct Jewish sensibility, they are not all Jewish jokes. But be prepared to do plenty of kvelling and plotzing at the Westside Theatre, ironically a former German Baptist Church that still boasts a stone in the outside wall that declares “Christus der Eckstein 1855” (Christ’s Cornerstone).
AMERICAN GAGSTERS — GREAT COMEDY TEAMS: HOLIDAY
Cary Grant gets caught in the middle of two sisters in HOLIDAY
HOLIDAY (George Cukor, 1938)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, August 19, 2:00 & 6:50
Series runs through September 17
212-415-5500
www.bam.org
Although the screwball romantic comedies are perhaps best loved for their madcap antics and fast-paced dialogue, there was also a fascinating underlying motif to many of them — as America came out of the Great Depression and WWII beckoned, the films tackled the theme of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. George Cukor’s 1938 classic, Holiday, however, looks at the world from a slightly different perspective, pitting the rich vs. the super-rich. Based on the Broadway play by Philip Barry, which was turned into a 1930 film featuring Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, Hedda Hopper, Robert Ames, and William Holden, Cukor’s version stars Cary Grant as Johnny Case, a self-made humble financial wizard who dreams of making just enough money to be able to afford to leave the business and go find himself. Following a whirlwind ten-day courtship with Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) while on vacation in Lake Placid, Johnny is shocked to find out that his fiancée is a member of the Seton clan, one of the richest families in America. Julia’s father, Edward (Henry Kolker), is not about to let his beloved daughter marry just anyone, so he puts Johnny through the ringer. Meanwhile, Johnny bonds with Julia’s sister, the black sheep Linda (Katharine Hepburn, who was the understudy for Linda on Broadway), who is desperate to live her own life but seems trapped in a fantasy, receiving only marginal support from their brother, Ned (Lew Ayres), who is never without a drink and a cynical word about the family, washing away his failure in cocktail after cocktail. “Walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit,” he advises Johnny. Honest, dependable, and a surprisingly good gymnast, Johnny finds solace from the crazy Setons in his longtime friends, Nick (Horton, reprising his role from the earlier film) and Susan (Jean Dixon), simpler folk with a fine sense of humor and little time for high society. As midnight on New Year’s Eve approaches, the main characters’ lives come together and fall apart in hysterical yet serious ways. Holiday is not your average screwball comedy, instead seeking to take on more personal, psychologically intimate issues and succeeding wildly, continually defying expectations and turning clichés inside out. Grant is as cool as ever, but he adds a seldom-seen vulnerability that adds to his charm. Holiday is screening August 19 in the BAMcinématek series “American Gagsters: Great Comedy Teams,” which runs through September 17 and consists of fifty films (all but one in 35mm), including such other memorable Grant movies as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday on Saturday and The Philadelphia Story also on Sunday.
THALIA DOCS: NEVER STAND STILL
Documentary celebrates the long history of Jacob’s Pillow as a mecca for dance (photo by Christopher Duggan)
NEVER STAND STILL: DANCING AT JACOB’S PILLOW (Ron Honsa, 2011)
Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Sunday, August 19 & 26 and September 2, $14, 8:00
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
firstrunfeatures.com
In conjunction with the eightieth anniversary of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Ron Honsa has made Never Stand Still, a documentary that celebrates the long history of the national historic landmark dedicated to the art of movement. Narrated by Bill T. Jones, the seventy-five-minute documentary looks back at the founding of the Pillow, located in Becket, Massachusetts, through exciting archival footage of Ted Shawn and his wife, Ruth St. Denis, Shawn’s all-male troupe, and the construction of the first American theater dedicated specifically to dance. Honsa speaks with such legendary dancers and choreographers as Merce Cunningham, Suzanne Farrell, Mark Morris, Judith Jamison, Paul Taylor, and Marge Champion, who all discuss the importance of the Pillow as a nurturing creative mecca that continues to bring performers and audiences together from all over the world. “It was a place where people could, quietly or not, think differently and act differently,” Cunningham says in one of his last interviews. Gideon Obarzanek calls the Pillow “one of the few places you can come and really feel and understand the past in order to move into the future.” Honsa focuses on a series of companies and creators as they rehearse and perform at Jacob’s Pillow, including Obarzanek’s Chunky Move, Rasta Thomas and Bad Boy Dance, solo artist Shivantala Shivalingappa, the Mark Morris Dance Group, Jens Rosén and Stockholm 59° North, Nikolaj Hübbe and the Royal Danish Ballet, and Bill Irwin, who pays tribute to the movement skills of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Honsa (The Men Who Danced) gives equal time to the past, present, and future of dance, incorporating classical, modern, contemporary, hip-hop, experimental, ballet, and other styles and genres, playing no favorites. The film is screening for three consecutive Sundays as part of the ongoing Thalia Docs program at Symphony Space, with Honsa participating in a Q&A following the August 19 show.
HARLEM WEEK
Harlem Week pays tribute to Jamaica and Bob Marley on Saturday and South Africa, Japan, and Don Cornelius on Sunday
West 135th St. and St. Nicholas Ave.
Saturday, August 18, and Sunday, August 19, free
harlemweek.com
Harlem Week offers a wide range of free programs this weekend, from health and education to sports and music and more. Saturday’s theme is “Summer in the City,” with the NY City Children’s Festival, a live broadcast of Stephen A. Smith’s ESPN radio show, a senior citizens swimming demonstration by the Harlem Honeys and Bears, the Historic College Fair & Expo, a Dancing in the Street salute to Jamaica’s fiftieth anniversary hosted by Dahved Levy, the Fabulous Fashion Flava Show, an international vendors village, Great Jazz on the Great Hill with Wycliffe Gordon, Alyson Williams, Steve Kroon, and Brianna Thomas, an Uptown Saturday Nite tribute to Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley, and an outdoor Imagenation screening of the documentary Marley. On Sunday, “Harlem: Where the World Meets the World” honors South Africa and Japan, including such seminal figures as Nelson Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and Don Cornelius, the legend behind Soul Train. The festivities feature the Upper Manhattan Auto Show, the NY City Health Village, the Upper Manhattan Small Business Expo & Fair, Tri-State Junior Tennis Clinics, the NY City Back to School Children’s Festival, and a live concert.
JAGUAR “CHILL” NY
Children and adults can chill out in the Jaguar “Chill” tent under the High Line (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Tenth Ave. at 17th St.
Saturday, August 18, free, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
www.jaguarusa.com/chill-ny
jaguar chill ny slideshow
It hasn’t been frightfully hot the last few days, but you can still chill out from the grimy August summer at the Jaguar “Chill” under the High Line at 17th St. Saturday is your last chance to put on real ice skates and swirl across plastic sheeting in a small rink situated within a large snow globe. The zone is open from 12 noon to 5:00, with former Rangers prospects Chris and Peter Ferraro giving tutorials from noon to 2:00. You can also get free wi-fi, an iced coffee from the Mudtruck, a flavored artisanal snocone from Handsome Dan’s, and a bottle of ice-cold water, with the tab picked up by Jaguar, which also has several new models on-site for you to check out. And if you’re feeling creative, make your own personalized snowflake and add it to the blizzard fence.