John Wilson talks with David Byrne about his latest Pace show and new book on February 7
Who:David Byrne,John Wilson What: Live virtual discussion Where:Pace Gallery, 540 West Twenty-Fifth St., Pace Gallery YouTube When: Monday, February 7, free (online), 7:00 Why: In his endlessly creative and fun HBO docuseries How To with John Wilson, Astoria native John Wilson uses footage shot all around New York City to delve into such issues as small talk, scaffolding, memory improvement, finding a parking spot, and making the perfect risotto. In his endlessly creative and fun career, British-born musician, singer, playwright, and visual artist David Byrne has made albums (solo and with Talking Heads), given concerts, directed films, and had gallery shows; currently, his brilliant American Utopia continues on Broadway at the St. James Theatre through April 3, and his latest exhibition, “How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic,” is running at Pace’s Twenty-Fifth St. space through March 19. The show consists of several series of drawings Byrne has done over the last twenty years, including his unusual depictions of dingbats sketched during the pandemic. (He describes his fascination with dingbats here.)
Byrne and Wilson have previously collaborated on the 2015 true crime concert documentary Temporary Color; they now will sit down together for a discussion at Pace in conjunction with the publication of Byrne’s new book, A History of the World (in Dingbats) (Phaidon, March 9, $39.95). “How We Learned About Non-Rational Logic: A Conversation on Humor and Bookmaking” takes place in person at Pace, where attendees will receive a signed copy of the book; the event will also be streamed for free over YouTube. “This idea of non-rational logic was not something I made up, but I realized that it kind of resonated with both the fact that I make music and the fact that these drawings follow a kind of logic that isn’t kind of based on logical or rational thinking,” Byrne notes in the above behind-the-scenes video. There should be plenty of such non-rational logic in what promises to be a very funny and illuminating talk.
Pam Tanowitz Dance’s Four Quartets makes its New York City debut February 10–12 at BAM (photo by Maria Baranova)
FOUR QUARTETS
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
February 10–12, $25-$95, 7:30
718-636-4100 www.bam.org pamtanowitzdance.org
T. S. Eliot’s 1936–42 epic Four Quartets poem begins with a two-part epigraph from Greek philosopher Heraclitus that warns, “Although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own. . . . The way upward and the way downward are the same.” Those words sound particularly relevant today as America battles through a pandemic and socioeconomic and racial inequality and injustice that are threatening the stability of our democracy. Heraclitus also wrote, “It is better to conceal ignorance than to expose it.” Meanwhile, Friedrich Nietzsche claimed, “Heraclitus was an opponent of all democratic parties.”
In 2018, Bronx-born, Westchester-raised choreographer Pam Tanowitz debuted her take on Eliot’s poem, as Four Quartets made its world premiere at Bard SummerScape; it is now coming to the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House for three performances, February 10–12. The seventy-five-minute piece features all-star collaborators, with music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho played by NYC orchestral collective the Knights, images by American abstract minimalist Brice Marden, costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, sets and lighting by Clifton Taylor, sound by Jean-Baptiste Barriére, and text performed live by Tony nominee and multiple Obie winner Kathleen Chalfant. (Bard’s recording of the audio was the first authorized version by a woman and an American.) The dancers are Kara Chan, Jason Collins, Dylan Crossman, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood.
“Making Four Quartets has changed me as an artist forever,” Tanowitz says in the above behind-the-scenes Bard documentary, There the Dance Is, which was filmed during the pandemic. “I’m not scared of failure. I’m not scared to imagine. And I’m not scared to take risks. I was before.”
“Burnt Norton,” the first section of Four Quarters, is an eerie reminder of what is happening in the United States and around the world today as we look toward a fraught future: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable. / What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present. / Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden. My words echo / Thus, in your mind. / But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know. / Other echoes / Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”
Tickets are going fast for the show, which is part of BAM’s “New York Season,” consisting of works by local creators, so act now if you want to see this widely praised production. Up next at BAM are Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love at BAM Strong’s Harvey Theater, running February 23–26, and longtime favorite SITI Company’s final physical theater presentation, The Medium, at BAM Fisher March 15–20. You can also catch Tanowitz’s Bartók Ballet, her first commission for New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center’s David H Koch Theater on February 22 and 23, a work for eleven dancers set to Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5.
New Yorkers should be flocking to see The Naked City and other Big Apple flicks at Film Forum
NYC’S MOVIE RENAISSANCE 1945 – 1955
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through February 10
212-727-8110 filmforum.org
In his July 2021 book “Keep ’Em in the East”: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Renaissance (Columbia University Press, $40), film historian Richard Koszarski details how New York City came to be a haven for making movies. “Fiorello La Guardia was the first New York mayor to realize the full significance of the motion picture industry to the city’s economic well-being. The few hundred jobs directly at stake in the late 1930s were not unimportant, but ever since the turn of the century, the movies — along with broadcasting and publishing — had also been doing something else for New Yorkers. Where the twentieth century had begun with a range of great American cities competing for world and national attention, it was now clear that modern America was no longer so flat a landscape. Now there was New York — and all those other places. Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco were all great cities, but New York was the city.”
Tony Curtis and Richard Jaeckel are two of the toughies in Maxwell Shane’s City Across the River
New York City native Koszarski will be at Film Forum to talk about a few of the films in “NYC’s Movie Renaissance 1945 – 1955,” a two-week series consisting of two dozen flicks that take place in and around Gotham, released in the ten years beginning around the end of WWII. The diverse selection ranges from noir and romcoms to musicals and courtroom dramas, psychological studies and cop stories with car chases. Among the many stars you’ll encounter are Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Sainte, Richard Conte, Judy Holliday, Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Coleen Gray, Richard Widmark, Thelma Ritter, Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Vittorio Gassman, Gloria Grahame, John Garfield, Moms Mabely, and Victor Mature.
Earl McEvoy’s The Killer That Stalked New York is among the many surprises in Film Forum series
Familiar classics such as Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, Henry Hathaway’s The House on 92nd St. and Kiss of Death, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s On the Town, and William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie are joined by such lesser-known works as George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind, Maxwell Shane’s City Across the River, Earl McEvoy’s The Killer That Stalked New York, Maxwell Shane’s City Across the River, Josh Binney’s Boardinghouse Blues, cinematographer extraordinaire Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window, and Bernard Vorhaus’s incarcerated women tale So Young, So Bad with Rita Moreno and Anne Francis.
Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss is part of Film Forum series about the renaissance of NYC-set flicks
Koszarski writes about Fletcher Markle’s Jigsaw, “Interesting suggestions of widespread corruption involving the mafia, right wing vigilantes, and political power brokers who operate out of Manhattan penthouses. . . . Most of the cast consisted of unfamiliar New York faces, but Markle and [Franchot] Tone did convince quite a few of their friends to pop up in oddball cameos.” And he explains about Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley’s absolute gem Little Fugitive, in which a young boy goes on a Coney Island adventure, its “simplicity was itself a great part of its appeal: no pointed moral, no dramatic character arc, no allegorical references to corruption, intolerance, World War II, or nuclear disarmament. Instead the audience is led on by the film’s uncanny sense of observation — not just in terms of photographic imagery but in the way ordinary New Yorkers relate to one another, solve their little problems, and go about the mundane details of their everyday lives.”
Moms Mabely stars in Josh Binney’s Boardinghouse Blues
Koszarski will introduce Joseph Lerner’s awesomely titled Guilty Bystander, featuring Zachary Scott as an ex-cop house detective, on February 2 at 6:40. Master Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein will introduce Jules Dassin’s genre-defining The Naked City on February 5 at 7:50, accompanied by his short personal documentary, Uncovering The Naked City, and Susan Delson, author of Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time (Indiana University Press, December 2021, $35-$85), will present “Soundies: America for a Dime” on February 10 at 6:50, focusing on “movie jukebox” clips from Duke Ellington, Nat “King” Cole, Dorothy Dandridge, Fats Waller, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and others.
Bill Jr. (Buster Keaton) mimics his father, Bill Campbell (Ernest Torrence), in silent film classic
Who:Dana Stevens, Imogen Sara Smith What: Screening and discussion about Buster Keaton Where:Film at Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West Sixty-Fifth St. When: Thursday, January 27, $15, 7:00 Why: “Steamboat Bill, Jr. may be [Buster] Keaton’s most mature film, a fitting if too-early farewell to his period of peak creative independence,” Slate film critic Dana Stevens writes. “Its relationship to the rest of its creator’s work has been compared to that of Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest.” Stevens gets serious about the Great Stone Face, one of silent film’s best comics, in her brand-new book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Atria, $29.99).
In celebration of the launch of the tome, Stevens will be at Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater on January 27 at 7:00 to screen a 4K restoration of the 1928 classic, directed by Charles Reisner, about a riverboat battle and true love, preceded by a 2K restoration of Keaton and Edward F. Cline’s twenty-five-minute masterpiece, One Week, about a pair of newlyweds (Keaton and Sybil Seely) and their unusual new home. (Both films feature orchestral scores by American composer Carl Davis.) Stevens will put Keaton’s life and work in sociocultural context with Criterion contributor Imogen Sara Smith, author of Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. If you’ve never seen Keaton on the big screen, now is the time, as no one could turn tragedy into comedy quite like Keaton.
Who:Ric Burns,James Sanders What: An Evening with Ric Burns and James Sanders Where:National Arts Club Zoom When: Friday, January 14, free with advance RSVP, 8:00 Why: This past November, documentarian Ric Burns and architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders released a revised and expanded version of their 1999 book, New York: An Illustrated History (Knopf, $75), a companion volume to PBS’s eight-part, seventeen-hour TV series that ran from 1999 to 2003. On January 14 at 8:00, Burns and Sanders will discuss the third edition of the book in a free, livestreamed National Arts Club discussion over Zoom.
“Especially in the past year — a defining crossroads in the life of the city and the planet — the eyes of much of the world have turned to New York City, which has found itself, yet again, at the epicenter and leading edge of increasingly momentous global experiences,” they write in the new preface. “In the coming years, as the world emerges from the worst of the pandemic, and New Yorkers themselves try to comprehend what has happened to their city and their lives, the example of New York — its history, its perspective, its setbacks, and perhaps above all its capacity for innovation, resilience, and adaptation — will be looked to as a kind of vanguard in which, in many ways, the lineaments of the future of all cities may be discerned.” The third edition goes up to the present day, with two new chapters, 128 new illustrations, and contributions from Adam Gopnik, Suketu Mehta, and Ester Fuchs, in conjunction with new episodes of the series.
WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP
January 12, 19, 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Exhibition continues through February 21 at MoMA
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium www.moma.org
“It has been said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but what about the people the master treated as tools?” Adam Pendleton writes in his 2017 Black Dada Reader. “That is, the ‘tools’ that were themselves capable of practicing abstraction, those three-fifths? Before the question about tools can be asked, there must already be an understanding about what a tool is and what it is not. . . . One day there are masters and tools, and the next, only people.”
Pendleton’s multimedia installation, Who Is Queen?, on view in MoMA’s Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium through February 21, is a unique neighborhood built of various tools, where visitors walk in the middle of three five-story black scaffold towers made of timber, laden with paintings, drawings, text, graffiti-style screenprints, speakers, and a large screen that shows new and archival footage involving the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia (the city where Pendleton was born in 1984); Resurrection City, a forty-two-day encampment protest on the National Mall in 1968 that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign for civil rights; and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, a film about author, professor, and gender theorist Jack Halberstam, the latest in a series by Pendleton that follows works about Kyle Abraham, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, and Yvonne Rainer. Among the text that can be made out on the canvases are such phrases as “But now I am,” “We are not,” “Everything,” and “They will love us all,” accompanied by a sound collage that includes American violinist Hahn Rowe’s “Yellow Smile,” a poem read by Amiri Baraka, excerpts from the 2014 Ferguson solidarity protest in New York City, and music by Jace Clayton, Julius Eastman, Laura Rivers, Frederic Rzewski, Linda and Sonny Sharrock, and Hildegard Westerkamp.
Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? includes sculpture, painting, film, drawing, sound, and text (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The scaffolding resembles fire escape ladders with platforms, but the public is not permitted to walk up and get closer to some of the pieces, which can reach sixty feet high. You might also have trouble making out all the words on the lower works as a parade of museumgoers pose in front of them foor pictures without even reading what they say about politics, race, inequality, gender, and the social contract. Pendleton has previously explored those concepts in such exhibitions as “what a day was this” at Lever House, detailing his manifesto, and his lobby piece As Heavy as Sculpture welcoming visitors to the New Museum’s instantly seminal “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” show.
Adam Pendleton uses black-and-white text and imagery in multimedia MoMA installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro-pessimism,” Pendleton explained in a statement. “It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.” The articulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which has been ten years in the making, expands with a series of livestreamed Zoom reading groups and recorded podcast dialogues that are all free; snippets of the conversations will be added to the overall sound collage in the atrium.
Wednesday, January 12, 6:00 Reading Group with Harmony Holiday and Jasmine Sanders, inspired by Adam Pendleton’s idea of “poetic research” and focusing on Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and an interview between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida, “The Other’s Language”
Wednesday, January 19, 6:00 Reading Group with Che Gossett and Jules Gill-Peterson, focusing on a 2011 interview between cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and political philosopher Michael Hardt, “No One Is Sovereign in Love”
Tuesday, January 25, 6:00 Reading Group with Jace Clayton and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, focusing on “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” by James A. Snead
Adam Pendleton installation reaches sixty feet high in MoMA atrium (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Special FIAF program looks at new book and exhibition about Christian Dior
Who: Marie-France Pochna, Matthew Yokobosky What: Discussion about new book and art exhibition on Christian Dior Where:FIAF Skyroom and online, 22 East 60th St. between Park & Madison Aves. When: Thursday, January 13, online or in person, $25, 7:00 Why: “Women have instinctively understood that I dream of making them not only more beautiful but also happier,” fashion revolutionary Christian Dior once said. If you didn’t get tickets for the special scent tour the Brooklyn Museum is hosting on January 19 in conjunction with its exhibition “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” you can still get a behind-the-scenes taste of the popular show with the January 13 FIAF Talk between Marie-France Pochna and Matthew Yokobosky, “Dreaming of Dior,” taking place in person at the French Institute Alliance Française’s Skyroom and online. Pochna is the author of the new book Christian Dior: Destiny: The Authorized Biography (Rizzoli, October 2021, $35), which includes the above quote, while Yokobosky, the senior curator of Fashion and Material Culture at the museum, collaborated with Denver Art Museum curator Florence Müller on the exhibit, which continues in Brooklyn through February 20. Depending on the nature of the omicron variant, the discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
