this week in literature

PATTI SMITH WITH LENNY KAYE

Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye will celebrate forty years since they first played together at the Poetry Project on Wednesday night (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East Tenth St. at Second Ave.
Wednesday, February 9, $15, 7:30
212-674-0910
www.poetryproject.org

“Everything changed after Lenny Kaye and I performed at St. Mark’s,” Patti Smith writes in JUST KIDS, her National Book Award-winning memoir about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. That career-making event took place at the Poetry Project on February 10, 1971, as Smith read her work and Kaye played guitar. Kaye, a music journalist and record-store employee, would go on to play in the Patti Smith Group and the Jim Carroll Band, produce hits for the likes of Suzanne Vega, and put together the seminal Nuggets collection, while Smith went on to become one of the leading woman punk rockers and an influential poet who took nearly a decade off to raise two children with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith. Smith and Kaye, who have played together on and off ever since that historic moment, will be back at the Poetry Project on February 9, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of that initial performance in a benefit to raise funds for the nonprofit organization. They will be joined by poet, artist, and Jersey City native Janet Hamill for the special show; tickets are only $15 but available at the door only, not in advance, so be sure to get there early — and we mean early.

(Smith will also be at the 92nd St. Y the following Wednesday, February 16, at 8:00 for “An Evening with Patti Smith,” in which she will discuss her relationship with Mapplethorpe and JUST KIDS and sign copies of the book; although tickets [$29] are sold out, a limited number might be made available an hour before showtime.)

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR SERIES / GREAT THINKERS OF OUR TIME

Joseph O’Neill will discuss his creative process on February 8 at Hunter College literary series (photo by Lisa Ackerman)

The Writing Center
Hunter College Faculty Dining Room, West Building, eighth floor
695 Park Ave.
Free with RSVP: 212-772-4292 or via e-mail
www.hunter.cuny.edu

The Continuing Education Center at Hunter College is offering an exciting season of free literary events this spring, all free with advance RSVP and each one including a Q&A session, a book signing, and a reception. In the Best-Selling Author Series, writers will discuss their creative process. On February 8, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Joseph O’Neill will talk about such books as NETHERLAND (2008) and BLOOD-DARK TRACK: A FAMILY HISTORY, followed March 7 by Barbara Taylor Bradford, March 28 by Francine Prose, and May 9 by Jane Smiley. Great Thinkers of Our Time, in which scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and artists delve into their work and specific discoveries, gets under way March 11 with theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek and continues March 22 with ethicist, psychologist, and feminist Carol Gilligan, April 6 with developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, and April 13 with mathematical and theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson.

LUNAR NEW YEAR FESTIVAL

Qi Baishi, “Two Rabbits,” hanging scroll, ink and color on paper, twentieth century (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, in memory of La Ferne Hatfield Ellsworth, 1986)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
February 4-6, most events free with recommended admission of $20 adults (children under twelve free)
212-570-3828
www.metmuseum.org

The celebration of the Year of the Rabbit heads uptown for the Met’s three-day Lunar New Year Festival, beginning tonight at 6:00 with “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Its Survival and Conservation,” a lecture by Henry Tzu Ng held in conjunction with the exhibition “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City.” At 8:00, David Rakoff hosts “Gilded Ink: Write like an Emperor,” an evening of prizewinning short stories by college students, preceded by a tour of “The Emperor’s Private Paradise” at 6:30. Tomorrow the Year of the Rabbit hops all over the museum, with a Sesame Street puppet show at 11:00, Storytime in Nolen Library at 11:45, a lion dance procession at 12:15, a fan and ribbon dance, calligraphy and face painting, a costume demonstration, and a drawing workshop at 1:00, a youth orchestra concert at 1:30, a tea ceremony at 2:15, and Peking Opera performances of LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD at 3:00 (one hour children’s show, $15) and 7:00 (full concert with acrobatics, live music and dance, martial arts, and more, $30). The festivities conclude on Sunday with a special look at “The Emperor’s Private Paradise,” featuring a series of lectures beginning at 2:00, including Maxwell K. Hearn’s “Art, Artifice, and Identity—The World of the Qianlong Emperor,” Nancy Berliner’s “A Chinese Garden in Space and over Time,” and Ben Wang’s “The Musicality of Chinese Poetry and Calligraphy in the World of the Qianlong Emperor.”

FIRST SATURDAYS: FRAMING OUR HISTORY

Hank Willis Thomas will discuss his long-term installation, “Unbranded,” at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday night (Hank Willis Thomas, “Why wait another day to be adorable? Tell your beautician ‘Relax me,’” chromogenic photograph, 1968/2007)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, February 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

For its February First Saturdays free program, the Brooklyn Museum is honoring Black History Month with its usual wide-ranging schedule of events. Kicking things off at 5:00 will be the Fat Cat Big Band, with Jade Synstelien leading a group of up to sixteen musicians through jazz and bebop. At 5:30, Denzel Washington’s THE GREAT DEBATERS (2007) will be shown, introduced by author Trey Ells (RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW), who will also participate in a Q&A following the screening. At 6:00, curator and writer Kalia Brooks will discuss the exhibition “Lorna Simpson: Gathered”: Simpson’s photographs will also be the focus of the 6:30 Hands-On Art workshop, and people are encouraged to bring their own photos to add to a collaborative interactive project as well. At 7:00, curator Sharon Matt Atkins will take visitors on a tour of “Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera,” while at 8:00 a student guide will give a Young Voices gallery talk on the installation “American Identities: A New Look.” The always hot dance party gets under way at 8:00, hosted by DJ Stormin’ Norman, who will be playing hip-hop and soul tunes. And at 9:00, Hank Willis Thomas will discuss his long-term installation, “Unbranded,” while at the same time the Smalls Jazz Club All-Stars will take listeners back to the Golden Age of music.

LUNAR NEW YEAR AT MOCA: YEAR OF THE RABBIT

Artist, musician, storyteller, and novelist Mingmei Yip will lead a calligraphy demonstration as part of Lunar New Year Festival Family Day at MOCA on January 30

Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre St. between Howard & Grand Sts.
Thursday – Monday, $7 (free Thursdays 11:00 am – 9:00 pm)
Reservations required for most Lunar New Year events
212-619-4785
www.mocanyc.org

The celebration of the Year of the Rabbit, 4709, is under way, with special programs and events scheduled for the next few weeks throughout Chinatown, honoring affectionate, pleasant, cautious, sentimental, obliging, superficial people born in 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, and 2011. At the Museum of Chinese in America, the talk “Decoding the Chinese Almanac’s Predictions for 2011” is scheduled for today at 2:30 ($15), with New Year Walking Tours taking place January 30 and February 5 ($18, 1:00). Tomorrow is Lunar New Year Festival Family Day, with storyteller Kam Mak, a noodle-making workshop, a gallery talk of the exhibition “Chinese Puzzles: Games for the Hands and Minds,” arts and crafts, a lion dance, a calligraphy demonstration with Mingmei Yip, and more ($10, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm). And on February 4, the Chinese Cinema Club will present Liu Jiayin’s 2009 sequel OXHIDE II, followed by a discussion on dumplings and the New Year with chef and writer Kian Lam Kho ($10, 7:00).

WALLS AND BRIDGES: TRANSATLANTIC INSIGHTS

Photographer Jen Davis will join Pierre Cassou-Noguès for “Picturing the Self: A Philosopher Discusses a Photographer’s Work” at the Aperture Gallery as part of Walls and Bridges festival (Jen Davis, “Mike, Del Rio, TX,” archival pigment print / © 2008 Jen Davis)


New York Public Library, Celeste Bartos Forum (and other venues)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
455 Fifth Ave. at 42nd St.
January 27 – February 4, free – $15
www.wallsandbridges.net
www.nypl.org

From January 27 through February 4, the inaugural Walls and Bridges festival will seek to break down barriers and build new dialogues and thought processes with a series of fascinating programs held throughout the city. Organized by the Villa Gillet and the Conseil de la Création artistique, the first part of Walls and Bridges — it’ll be back in the spring and summer — begins January 27 at 7:00 with the round-table discussion “Art/Truth/Lies: The Perils and Pleasures of Deception,” which brings together Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Glenn D. Lowry, and host D. Graham Burnett at the New York Public Library. On Friday at 6:00, Paul Holdengräber will moderate “The Magical Side of Celebrity” with Cécile Guilbert, Laura Kipnis, and Wayne Koestenbaum, followed at 8:00 by one of Walls and Bridges’ premier events, “Three Faiths in the Form of a Fugue,” a combination of art, poetry, music, and philosophy relating to the library’s current exhibition about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and featuring Salman Ahmad, Reza Aslan, Ala Ebtekar, Dan Fishback, Fabrice Hadjadj, Alicia Jo Rabins, Shirin Neshat, and Damien Poisblaud, hosted by Reza Aslan. Other programs take on “The End of Privacy: The State and Surveillance,” “The New Faces of the Enemy,” “Going Public: Embodying a Persona,” and “The Shapes of Space — The Shears of Time: Why Does Philosophy Need Art to Become Truly Experimental?,” with such participants as Maira Kalman, Daniel Handler, Philip Gourevitch, Cynthia Hopkins, Josh Neufeld, and Rick Moody at such venues as the New School, the Aperture Gallery, the Greenlight Bookstore, the Brooklyn Flea, Joe’s Pub, UnionDocs, and the French Institute Alliance Française in addition to the NYPL. The name of the festival comes from Sir Isaac Newton’s quote “We build too many walls and not enough bridges,” although we’d also like to think it relates to John Lennon’s classic 1974 album WALLS AND BRIDGES as well.

COUSIN CORINNE’S REMINDER: ISSUE NUMBER TWO PARTY

BookCourt
163 Court St. between Dean & Pacific Sts.
Wednesday, January 26, free, 7:00
718-875-3677
www.bookcourt.org
www.cousincorinne.com

In April 2010, the inaugural issue of the oversized trade paperback Cousin Corinne’s Reminder was published, released by an independent Brooklyn-based publishing group in conjunction with the Cobble Hill store BookCourt, whose manager, Zack Zook, served as executive editor. The biannual journal’s stated mission “is to widen the scope of artistic representation within the printed world by combining literary and visual presences.” The first issue included contributions from such notables as Charles Bock, Anne Waldman, Jonathan Letham & Dean Haspiel, Mark Borthwick, Kimiko Yoshida, Donald Moss, and James Frey. The second issue has just been released, bigger and better than the first, a compendium of fiction, poetry, comics, photography, art, and other ramblings from authors and artists who mostly hail from Brooklyn. Beautifully designed by Michael Fusco, Issue Number Two opens with, appropriately enough, George Emilio Sanchez’s “Shalom,” a brief story about his heritage, and includes such other highlights as David Hollander’s absurdist, futuristic “The Limits of Bioinformatics and the Problematic of Meaninglessness: A Case Study”; Stanley Crouch’s “A Darkie French Princess,” about a young man fighting the expectations that come with art, athletics, the quest for knowledge, and skin tone; and Stephen Elliott’s sex diary, “Selections from the Daily Rumpus.” Tierney Gearon’s “The Haircut” creates a touching narrative through a suite of six photographs of a naked mother giving her young son a haircut with a stunning vista behind them, while Anthony Barboza’s “Black Dreams / White Sheets” consists of ten photos in which ten black men, women, and a child are shown lying in different positions on a mattress, shot from directly above. Amelie Mancini’s talk about her newfound love of baseball is accompanied by her David Hockney-inspired paintings of such Hall of Famers as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Tom Seaver. And the Comix Blox, curated by Haspiel, includes tasty tidbits from Michel Fiffe, Tim Hamilton, and Haspiel himself.

The release of the second issue of Cousin Corinne’s Reminder will be celebrated at BookCourt on January 26 with a special program that includes an opening performance by Sanchez, readings by Crouch, Priscilla Becker, Todd Colby, Catherine Lacey, and Adam Wilson, a comix presentation by Haspiel and Joan Reilly, signings by comix contributors Jen Ferguson, Hamilton, and Fiffe, a painting by Mancini, free drinks, and other guests.