this week in literature

FILM COMMENT SELECTS: LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL

Kim Tae-woo is outstanding as annoying, self-obsessed auteur in Hong Sangsoo’s LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL

LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL (JAL ALJIDO MOT HAMYEONSUH) (Hong Sangsoo, 2009)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
March 2, 3:45 & 9:00; March 3, 6:00
Series runs through March 4, $12 per screening, All Access Pass $129
212-875-6500
www.filmlinc.com
www.blog.naver.com

South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo’s latest film about a South Korean auteur, LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL, is another intriguing examination of art and sex in contemporary society, following NIGHT AND DAY (2008), WOMAN ON THE BEACH (2006), TALE OF CINEMA (2005), and WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004). Hong, who has served as a juror at several film festivals and whose work has screened at fests all over the world, sets his latest self-reflexive story at the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival, where director Ku will be part of the jury. But it turns out that Ku is a self-absorbed, insensitive, and subtly obnoxious filmmaker who cares only about himself, walking away from fans and colleagues in the middle of a conversation or in the midst of signing an autograph, interested only in listening to people praise his own talent, which has been relegated to art-house films that few people see and even fewer understand. After leaving the festival to teach a class at a school on Jeju Island, he visits with a famous painter and former mentor who has unknowingly married Ku’s first love, setting the stage for the creepy Ku to perform yet more selfish acts. Kim Tae-woo is outstanding in the lead role, playing the self-obsessed director with an unerring casualness that makes him more absurdly ridiculous than conniving and mean-spirited. With a little bit of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 here, Woody Allen’s STARDUST MEMORIES there, Hong once again reveals the soft underbelly of ego within the film industry, but he also needs to edit himself more, as the bittersweet, slyly ironic LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL, made for a mere $100,000, is his latest film to clock in at more than two hours.

Matt Damon stars in closing-night film, Paul Greengrass’s GREEN ZONE

LIKE YOU KNOW IT ALL is screening as part of Film Comment Selects, the cinephile magazine’s tenth annual examination of international works that have been overlooked, have not yet received distribution, or deserve to be rediscovered. The series, held at the Walter Reade Theater, runs through March 4 and includes such films as Elia Suleiman’s THE TIME THAT REMAINS, Edward Yang’s A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s AIR DOLL, a four-film focus on Philippe Grandrieux, Carl Foreman’s THE VICTORS, and a special screening of THE AVIATOR’S WIFE in honor of the late Eric Rohmer.

BOOK LAUNCH PARTY: CRYSTAL VELASQUEZ / ELIZABETH PAULSON

crystal

Sweet & Vicious
5 Spring St. betweem Elizabeth St. & Bowery
Wednesday, February 24, free, 6:00
www.sweetandviciousnyc.com
www.randomhouse.com
www.skyhorsepublishing.com

Rescheduled because of the February 10 snowstorm, the dual children’s book launch of Crystal Velasquez’s YOUR LIFE, BUT BETTER! (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, $7.99) and Elizabeth Paulson’s 98 WAYS TO FIND A GREAT GUY (Skyhorse, $12.95) is now taking place February 24 at the hip SoHo club Sweet & Vicious. As Velasquez notes in her introduction, her book is “the only interactive series that lets your true personality lead the way,” making the reader the main character and including a quiz at the end of each chapter as well as, of course, a visit to the mall. Velasquez’s book is the first of two; the sequel, YOUR LIFE, BUT COOLER!, is coming in May. Meanwhile, Paulson states in her author bio that she “hopes she’ll find a boyfriend as a result of writing” her book, an illustrated examination of the dating scene. Both publishing professionals based in New York City, Velasquez and Paulson should know how to throw one heckuva party, judging by their surprising choice of location.

MoCCA ART FESTIVAL: DISAPPEARANCE DIARY

disappearance diary

DISAPPEARANCE DIARY by Hideo Azuma (Fanfare / Ponent Mon, 2008, $22.99)
69th Regiment Armory
68 Lexington Ave. between 25th & 26th Sts.
April 10-11, $10-$12/day, $15-$20/both days
212-254-3511
www.moccany.com
www.ponentmon.com

in preparation for this year’s MoCCA Art Festival, the annual benefit for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, we will be highlighting some of our favorite books and comics from past festivals. Last year we picked up a copy of Hideo Azuma’s fascinating true-life story, DISAPPEARANCE DIARY, which details the popular manga artist’s self-imposed departure from the world he knew, instead choosing to become homeless, where his alcoholism nearly killed him. In tightly drawn black-and-white panels, Azuma follows his crazy tale over the course of eight days and two “disappearances,” walking out on his wife and his regular job, scavenging through garbage for food and drink, and eventually working for a gas company while still shunning all aspects of his previous life. Throughout, Azuma reveals his wry, self-deprecating sense of humor, which is also evident in the brief interview hidden beneath the trade paperback book’s flaps.

mocca art festival 2010

This year’s MoCCA Art Festival runs April 10-11 at the 69th Regiment Armoy, featuring such participants as Kim Deitch, Emily Flake, Jaime Hernandez. Neil Kleid, Peter Kuper, Hope Larson, Frank Miller, Paul Pope, Dash Shaw, Gahan Wilson, and Klein Award recipient David Mazzucchelli. Single tickets are $10 in advance, $12 day of show, with weekend tickets available for $15 in advance and $20 at the door.

IN THE WORDS OF DURAS

Marguerite Duras, Hall des Roches Noires, Trouville, 1982 (copyright Hélène Bamberger)

Cultural Services of the French Embassy, 972 Fifth Ave.
French Institute Alliance Français, 22 East 60th St.
Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th St.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave.
February 18 – March 18, free – $35
www.fiaf.org
www.frenchculture.org
www.bacnyc.org
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Born Marguerite Donnadieu in Indochina in 1914, French writer Marguerite Duras had a long career as a journalist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and director. A graduate of the Sorbonne who was raised in extreme poverty, she served in the French Resistance, was expelled from the Communist Party, suffered from alcoholism and hallucinations late in life, and spent her last years with writer Yann Andréa Steiner, who was nearly forty years her junior, before dying of throat cancer in Paris in 1996. Duras’s extraordinary life and work will be celebrated with a month of special events at locations around the city, from documentaries to discussions, avant-garde dance and theater to readings and an intimate photo exhibit. On February 18, the French Institute Alliance Français will host “Meet the Writer…en français,” a discussion with Duras biographer Jean Vallier ($15), followed by “Talk with Jean Vallier: Bringing Duras’s Word to the Stage” in English ($15). On February 26-27, ASTRID BAS DIPTYCH: THE LOVER AND LA MUSICA DEUXIÈME consists of stage productions, with music, of two seminal works by Duras ($35). And on March 6-7, Nicole Ansari, Winsome Brown, Joan Juliet Buck, and Sadie Jemmett star in Irina Brook’s play inspired by Duras’s LA VIE MATÉRIELLE and Virginia Woolf’s A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN ($35).

Astrid Bas presents a Duras diptych at FIAF as part of citywide celebration

The Baryshnikov Arts Center will be presenting the U.S. premiere of L’HOMME ASSIS DANS LE COULOIR (THE MAN SITTING IN THE CORRIDOR), a dance created by Razerka Ben Sadia-Lavant based on the 1980 novella by Duras, performed by Sarah Crépin and Alexandre Dutronc (February 19-21, $20). From 1980 to 1994, photojournalist Hélène Bamberger and Duras spent summers together in Trouville; Bamberger’s photos of the author, collected as “Marguerite Duras par Hélène Bamberger,” will be on view February 18 – March 18 at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. The exhibit opens on February 17 with bilingual readings by Kathleen Chalfant and William Nadylam (free but RSVP required at 212-439-1485, duras@frenchculture.org). On March 2, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy will be screening THE LOVER: FANSTASY OF A MOVIE, a documentary with Claude Berri and others about the film adaptation of THE LOVER, along with a discussion with French professor Sophie Bogaert (free, rsvp@frenchculture.org). One of Duras’s most well known works, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, will be presented onstage at BAC March 4-6, directed by Christine Letailleur and featuring Valérie Lang, Hiroshi Ota, and Pier Lamandé ($25). Duras was also a unique and experimental filmmaker; her directorial works will be shown in the series “Marguerite Duras on Film” at Anthology Film Archives March 12-18, including screenings of DESTROY, SHE SAID (DÉTRUIRE DIT-ELLE) (1969), NATHALIE GRANCER (1972), LE NAVIRE NIGHT (1979), INDIA SONG (1975), and THE TRUCK (LE CAMION (1977), which stars Duras with Gérard Depardieu. “The best way to fill time is to waste it,” Duras once famously said. You could do a lot worse than wasting plenty of time at this wide-ranging, exciting festival honoring one of the most intriguing literary figures of the twentieth century.

TWI-NY TALK: ANDREW GIANGOLA

Mario Batali, Andrew Giangola, and Rachael Ray party it up at Texas Motor Speedway

THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY: TRUE STORIES OF REMARKABLE NASCAR FANS by Andrew Giangola (Motorbooks International, February 2010, $24.99)
www.theweekendstartsonwednesday.blogspot.com

We’ve known Andrew Giangola since we were kids, playing baseball in the street, sledding down what we thought were enormous hills in the local park, and going to semipro football games. Although New York is far from the center of the auto racing world, we did go to the track once, when a cigar-chomping family friend took us behind the scenes and into the pit. That apparently rubbed off on Giangola, who has been the director of communications for NASCAR since 2003, traveling around the country chaperoning star drivers and meeting the fans. He has turned his adventures into an entertaining book, THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY, which looks at dozens of NASCAR’s most dedicated fanatics, from movie icons and beauty queens to military heroes and astronauts, from news anchors and celebrity chefs to an acrophobic mountain climber and a dude who wears nothing but a tire.

“After sleeping in their buses, watching races in their homes, spending countless hours on the phone, sitting in the grandstands, and walking campgrounds on the circuit,” Giangola writes in the introduction, “I’m convinced NASCAR’s ‘core’ fans are a special, different breed…. I want to perpetuate a new stereotype of NASCAR fans. They are, at their core, very good people.” Giangola, who lives in New York City with his wife, daughter, and two dogs — and whose last driving ticket was for going zero miles per hour, blocking the box at the Holland Tunnel — took a break from his media blitz to answer a few questions from an old friend.

twi-ny: You grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, not exactly a hotbed of auto racing. You’ve always been a huge sports fan, but tell the truth — what did you think of NASCAR when you first applied for the position, and how do you feel about it now?

AG: Your father took us to a stock car race at the old short track in Freeport, LI, when I was eleven and I loved it. (That track is now a strip mall.) I also watched [Richard] Petty and [David] Pearson and [Cale] Yarborough on WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS when NASCAR snippets were shown between ping-pong and cliff diving. When I was exposed to the sport, I always liked it. But growing up on Long Island in the ’70s, you didn’t see a lot of NASCAR; the sport might as well have been racing on Mars. There was no ESPN or 24/7 sports coverage. I was by no means a fan.

When I got the job offer, after a quick web search it was pretty clear pretty fast that this is a big, powerful brand with a lot of company involvement. My real shock was at the first race; it happened to be Talladega, NASCAR’s biggest and rowdiest track, in the heart of Alabama. I was wearing black slacks and a black shirt. A fan gripping a large beer yells down from the top of his converted school bus, “When are the aliens coming?” It was immediately clear NASCAR fans were familiar with the film MEN IN BLACK and that I’d need to learn the rules of the road, so to speak. Seven years later, I was sleeping with those fans — not in the biblical sense; it was research — and published THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY about the most amazing fan stories.

You’ve worked in communications for Pepsi and Simon & Schuster, handling different kinds of crises than you encounter at NASCAR. What’s the hardest part of your current job? You’re also a wise-ass who was once championed as the savior of the PR business. How do you get away with your sarcastic sense of humor at such a giant, serious company?

I’m not sure anyone ever championed me as a savior but that’s nice of you to say, and let me introduce you to my boss at an upcoming race. This is such a decentralized, multifaceted industry. You have NASCAR the sanctioning body, teams, tracks, drivers, sponsors, licensees, media partners. In a sense, in my job in PR out of NASCAR’s New York office, I serve them all. It keeps a man busy. I’ve worn out about five BlackBerries. No trackball has proven to be up to my workload. My daughter, Gaby, once said, “If work were crack, you’d sell me for a bag of it.” The toughest challenge is keeping some semblance of family balance while attempting to make every man, woman, child, and dog in the US of A a stock car racing fan.

You’re a die-hard Rangers fan, but you’ve claimed on your blog and in the book that NASCAR fans are the greatest in the world. Is that a diss to the Garden Faithful?

When the Rangers play on Saturday night, do the fans start sleeping in front of the Garden on a Wednesday? That’s what it’s like in NASCAR. But I think Ranger fans and NASCAR fans have a lot in common in their tremendous passion for their sports. (Go to a NASCAR track like Pocono Raceway or Dover and you’ll see a lot of cops and firemen in the infield who are big Ranger fans.) Remember, on any given Sunday in NASCAR there’s one winner and forty-two losers. Ranger fans can relate to that continual, gut-wrenching, seemingly endless heartbreak. All that said, I still tell my wife, Viviane, that the day we were married was almost as good as that warm night in June of 1994 when the Rangers finally won the Stanley Cup.

THE WEEKEND STARTS ON WEDNESDAY, which features a foreword by Tony Stewart and an afterword by Kyle Busch, is available now at online sites and bookstores everywhere. Giangola will be meeting and greeting fans at racing’s biggest event, the Daytona 500, this weekend, with eight fans from the book joining him for a special launch event and signing at the Sprint Experience on Saturday.

ECSTATIC PEACE POETRY JOURNAL

Tenth anniversary of Thurston Moore poetry journal is celebrated at White Columns

White Columns
320 West 13th St. between Hudson & West Fourth Sts.
Exhibition runs through February 27
Admission: free
212-924-4212
www.whitecolumns.org

White Columns is celebrating the tenth issue of the Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, produced and edited by Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, with an expanded exhibition dedicated to the art and writings in the publication and other poetry collected by Moore, along with readings and live performances. Pages from the journal’s history adorn the walls, featuring work by an eclectic group that includes Dennis Cooper, Gus van Sant, Kim Gordon, Rick Moody, Kathleen Hanna, Gerard Malanga, and Chan Marshall. Moore himself will be playing live during the January 23 reading by John Giorno and Byron Coley, the February 5 reading by Edmund Berrigan and Anselm Berrigan, and the February 19 reading by Richard Hell and Dorothea Lasky, and he will be reading with Anne Waldman on February 25, with live music by Ambrose Bye and Devin Waldman.

UNDER THE RADAR: THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE

Ohio Theatre has adapted Murakami’s THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE for the stage (photo by Ralph Ford)

Ohio Theatre
66 Wooster St.
Through January 30
Tickets: $18
212-966-4844
www.windupbc.com
www.sohothinktank.org

Bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami, whose short stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and who has written such beloved novels as SPUTNIK SWEETHEART, HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND AND THE END OF THE WORLD, and SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN, has been very cautious about allowing his work to be adapted for the screen. Kazuki Omori turned Murakami’s debut novel, HEAR THE WIND SING, into a 1980 drama; his short story “Tony Takatani” became a compelling 2004 film by Jun Ichikawa; and Robert Logevall directed a screen version of the short story ALL GOD’S CHILDREN CAN DANCE, starring Joan Chen. (Tran Anh Hung is currently in postproduction on NORWEGIAN WOOD.) However, there have been several short films made from his stories, as well as some notable stage adaptations, including Simon McBurney’s dazzling multimedia production, THE ELEPHANT VANISHES, a highlight of the 2004 Lincoln Center Festival, and the Steppenwolf Theater productions of KAFKA ON THE SHORE and AFTER THE QUAKE.

Now SoHo’s Ohio Theatre is attempting the seemingly impossible, adapting Murakami’s remarkable breakthrough novel, the dense and rewarding WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, into a multimedia stage presentation with music, dance video, puppets, and other intriguing elements. Stephen Earnhart and Greg Pierce’s production runs through January 30; tickets are $18 and going fast for this sneak peek at a work-in-progress scheduled to debut at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in March 2011.