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.
Who: Works by and/or featuring Moko Fukuyama, Joshua William Gelb, Gabrielle Hamilton, Jace, Elmore James, Jamal Josef, Katie Rose McLaughlin, Sara Mearns, Zaire Michel, Zalman Mlotek, Alicia Hall Moran, Patrick Page, Barbara Pollack, Seth David Radwell, Jamar Roberts, Tracy Sallows, Xavier F. Salomon, Janae Snyder-Stewart, Mfoniso Udofia, Anne Verhallen What:This Week in New York twentieth anniversary celebration Where:This Week in New York YouTube When: Original air date: Saturday, May 22, free with RSVP, 7:00 (now available on demand) Why: In April 2001, I found myself suddenly jobless when a relatively new Silicon Alley company that had made big promises took an unexpected hit. I took my meager two weeks’ severance pay and spent fourteen days wandering through New York City, going to museums, film festivals, parks, and tourist attractions. I compiled my experiences into an email I sent to about fifty friends, rating each of the things I had done. My sister’s husband enthusiastically demanded that I keep doing this, and This Week in New York was born.
Affectionately known as twi-ny (twhy-nee), it became a website in 2005 and soon was being read by tens of thousands of people around the globe. I covered a vast array of events – some fifteen thousand over the years – that required people to leave their homes and apartments and take advantage of everything the greatest city in the world had to offer. From the very start, I ventured into nooks and crannies to find the real New York, not just frequenting well-known venues but seeking out the weird and wild, the unusual and the strange.
For my tenth anniversary, we packed Fontana’s, a now-defunct club on the Lower East Side, and had live music, book readings, and a comics presentation. I had been considering something bigger for twenty when the pandemic lockdown hit and lasted longer than we all thought possible.
At first, I didn’t know what twi-ny’s future would be, with nowhere for anyone to go. But the arts community reacted quickly, as incredible dance, music, art, theater, opera, film, and hybrid offerings began appearing on numerous platforms; the innovation and ingenuity blew me away. The winners of twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards give you a good idea of the wide range of things I covered; you can check out part one here and part two here. (Part III is now up as well.)
I devoured everything I could, from experimental dance-theater in a closet and interactive shows over the phone and through the mail to all-star Zoom reunion readings and an immersive, multisensory play that arrived at my door in a box. Many of them dealt with the fear, isolation, and loneliness that have been so pervasive during the Covid-19 crisis while also celebrating hope, beauty, and resilience. I’ve watched, reviewed, and previewed more than a thousand events created since March 2020, viewing them from the same computer where I work at my full-time job in children’s publishing.
Just as companies are deciding the future hybrid nature of employment, the arts community is wrestling with in-person and online presentations. As the lockdown ends and performance venues open their doors, some online productions will go away, but others are likely to continue, benefiting from a reach that now goes beyond their local area and stretches across the continents.
On May 22 at 7:00, “twi-ny at twenty,” produced and edited by Michael D. Drucker of Delusions International and coproduced by Ellen Scordato, twi-ny’s business manager and muse, honors some of the best events of the past fourteen months, including dance, theater, opera, art, music, and literature, all of which can be enjoyed for free from the friendly confines of your couch. There is no registration fee, and the party will be available online for several weeks. You can find more information here.
Please let me know what you think in the live chat, which I will be hosting throughout the premiere, and be sure to say hello to other twi-ny fans and share your own favorite virtual shows.
Thanks for coming along on this unpredictable twenty-year adventure; I can’t wait to see you all online and, soon, in real life. Here’s to the next twenty!
The next edition of gorno’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck is part of Pioneers Go East Collective “Crossroads” series at Judson Memorial Church
Who:Pioneers Go East Collective What:Performance series Where:Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South between Thompson & Sullivan Sts. When: Thursday, December 9 & 16, free – $50 (sliding scale), 8:00 Why: Pioneers Go East Collective was founded in 2010 as “an arts and cultural organization inspiring a lively exchange of queer art and culture by connecting people to ideas and experiences.” Focusing on social engagement, collaboration, accessibility, and relevance, the Manhattan-based group has put on such multimedia performances as My name’sound,Virgo Star, and American Mill No. 2 at such venues as La MaMa, Ars Nova, A.R.T/ New York Theatre, and Triskelion Arts. On December 9 and 16, PGEC returns to Judson Memorial Church for the performance and video series “Crossroads,” building a community of art, poetry, music, dance, film, and more around the work of multigenerational queer, BIPOC, and feminist artists.
On December 9 at 8:00, curator Hilary Brown-Istrefi brings together ALEXA GRÆ’s eve’s witness. 2 soliloquies to the night, created by GRÆ, Jon Wes, and Matthew Ozawa with text by Connie Edgemon; Arien Wilkerson’s climate change performance installation Equators, made in collaboration with David Borawski, Jon-Paul LaRocco, and Domenic Pellegrini; and gorno’s (Glenn Potter-Takata) Yonsei f*ck f*ck pt. 12, a collaboration with evan ray suzuki and Kimiko Tanabe. The program on December 16 consists of dancer Lydia Mokdessi and musician Jason Bartell’s Devotion Devotion IV, joined by vocalist Syd Island; Marija Krtolica’s Infinite Subjectivity, a dance-theater piece performed by Michael Mangieri and Krtolica, with live music and reading by Jason Ciaccio and text by Søren Kierkegaard; and Janessa Clark’s film Future Becomes Past, with dancer Courtney Drasner revisiting a 2003 solo, photographed by Kathleen Kelley with music by Ben Lukas Boysen and Sebastian Plano, along with an untitled work in progress by Clark.
LAND OF BROKEN DREAMS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Concerts and convenings: December 9-11, $25
Installation: Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $18 www.armoryonpark.org
As part of Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things” monumental multimedia installation at Park Ave. Armory, there will be three days of live music, conversations, and performances that activate the space. Tickets are going fast for the “Land of Broken Dreams” series, which features nighttime concerts by singer-songwriter Somi on December 9, the jazz trio of Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, and Linda May Han Oh on December 10, and Terri Lyne Carrington and Lisa Fischer, whose latest project is “Music for Abolition,” on December 11. Tickets also include admission to a “Daytime Convening” from 1:00 to 7:00, with pop-up performances by more than 150 artists in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the Board of Officers Room, the Veterans Room, and the Colonels Room.
Among those participating are photographer Dawoud Bey, tap dancer Maurice Chestnut, painter Torkwase Dyson, theater director Scott Elliott, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, philanthropist Agnes Gund, poet, playwright, and novelist Carl Hancock Rux, dancer and choreographer Francesca Harper, musician and author Nona Hendryx, civil rights leader Ben Jealous, interdisciplinary artist Rashid Johnson, visual artist Joan Jonas, set designer Christine Jones, artist Deborah Kass, painter Julie Mehretu, cultural theorist, poet, and scholar Fred Moten, visual artist Shirin Neshat, curator, critic, and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, multimedia installation artist Tony Oursler, poet, essayist, playwright, and editor Claudia Rankine, sculptor Alyson Shotz, conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, rapper, actor, and Roots MC Tariq Trotter, author Quincy Troupe, director Whitney White, and the Peace Poets. You might just have to move in to the armory for seventy-two hours so you don’t miss a minute of what promises to be a memorable event.
