this week in literature

FIRST SATURDAYS: KEITH HARING’S NEW YORK

Keith Haring, still from PAINTING MYSELF INTO A CORNER, video, 1979 (© Keith Haring Foundation)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, July 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum sends off its “Keith Haring: 1978-1982” exhibit with a late-night celebration this weekend as part of its monthly First Saturdays program. (The show officially closes on Sunday.) The free evening will feature live performances by Mon Khmer, Mickey Factz, the Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, City Kids, and Plastiq Passion, an art battle, a hands-on workshop inspired by Haring’s “Art is for everyone” motto, clips from Jim Hubbard’s documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a signing and talk with Maripol about her book Little Red Riding Hood, a participatory sidewalk chalk mural, gallery talks, Q&As, and a dance party hosted by DJ Justin Strauss. The galleries will remain open until eleven, so be sure to check out such exhibits as “Raw Cooked: Ulrike Müller,” “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company,” “Playing House,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” and “Question Bridge: Black Males.”

MONET’S GARDEN

“Monet’s Garden” will change with the seasons at the New York Botanical Garden (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The New York Botanical Garden
2900 Southern Blvd.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 21, $8-$25
718-817-8700
www.nybg.org
monet’s garden slideshow

“My most beautiful work of art is my garden,” Impressionist master Claude Monet once explained to his stepson. That statement is at the heart of the wide-ranging New York Botanical Garden exhibition “Monet’s Garden,” on view through October 21 in the Bronx oasis. In 1883, the forty-two-year-old Monet moved with his family into a house in Giverny, where he spent the second half of his life developing magnificent gardens and creating some of his most famous masterpieces, paintings based on the natural world he immersed himself in. The New York Botanical Garden has transformed the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory into a tribute to Monet, complete with a facade of his house and a re-creation of the Grand Allée from the Clos Normand and the famed Japanese footbridge. The long, narrow path is lined with many of the plants that bloomed in Giverny and will change seasonally, beginning with such flowers as irises, morning glories, aubretias, roses, delphiniums, foxgloves, peonies, and poppies. Visitors can walk across the green footbridge, then head outside to the Conservatory Courtyard’s Hardy Pool, which is filled with water lilies and other aquatic plants similar to the ones Monet collected after having been introduced to Nymphaeas by Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. As you make your way over to the library, you can stroll along the Monet to Mallarmé Poetry Walk, featuring French Symbolist poems, inspired by nature, by Monet contemporaries Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé, who were doing with words what Monet was doing with paint.

Claude Monet, “The Artist’s Garden in Giverny,” oil on canvas, circa 1900 (courtesy Yale University Art Gallery)

The library’s Rondina Gallery is home to several vitrines of photographs of Monet by himself and with friends in the garden in addition to letters, sales receipts, and a glorious palette he used between 1914 and 1926, a work of art in itself. The gallery is also displaying two of Monet’s paintings, the lush and beautiful “The Artist’s Garden in Giverny” and the darker, more mysterious “Irises,” which has never before been shown in the United States. Upon exiting the library, be sure to stop by the Ross Gallery, where Elizabeth Murray’s “Seasons of Giverny” consists of more than two dozen photographs taken by Murray, who has been documenting the garden for a quarter century. Curated by Monet expert Dr. Paul Hayes Tucker, “Monet’s Garden” is supplemented by a series of special events and technological enhancements, including a free iPhone app, an audio tour, weekend screenings of the films The Impressionists: Monet and Monet’s Palate, monthly poetry salons, “Monet’s Friends” chamber music concerts, “Monet Evenings” water lily concerts, home-gardening demonstrations, adult education classes, and “Observe and Create” workshops for children. “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers,” Monet wrote in an 1890 letter to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The New York Botanical Garden celebrates both of these aspects of one of the world’s most beloved artists.

ADAM CAROLLA BOOK PARTY AND WEBINAR

Carolines on Broadway
1626 Broadway between 49th & 50th Sts.
Tuesday, June 12, $22 (plus two-drink minimum), 8:00
Stand-up: June 14-16, $53
212-757-4100
www.carolines.com
www.adamcarolla.com

“Let’s talk houses,” Adam Carolla writes in the introduction to his new memoir, Not Taco Bell Material (Crown Archetype, June 12, $25). “As a kid the places I called home were cracked stucco, dirt lawns, and furniture raccoons wouldn’t fuck on. But there’s another way of looking at homes. They are where you create memories with your family, good and bad, and the pad you launch from when you start your own life. . . . This book will be a journey from the plethora of dumps I was raised in, through the shithole apartments I rented in my twenties, to the homes I purchased and personally renovated when I found some success.” And what a series of dumps and shitholes they were. In his follow-up to the New York Times bestseller In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, the former star of The Man Show and current host of The Car Show and The Adam Carolla Show begins each new chapter with a photo and statistics about the house he was living in at that time as he leads readers on a very personal and funny trip down memory lane. He writes about his extremely strange family, toiling in construction, his up-and-down professional career, and the many celebrities he has worked with. He adds “Tan Gent” sidebars along the way that allow for additional rants and raves. Carolla will be celebrating the release of the book with a special presentation, signing, and webinar June 12 at Carolines with Artie Lange that will be broadcast live online to the first ten thousand people who sign up for the free event here. Carolla, who has also starred in the films Ace in the Hole and The Hammer, will follow that up with three nights of stand-up at Carolines June 14-16.

HOWL! FESTIVAL 2012

Street artists will surround Tompkins Square Park with colorful murals during the Howl! Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tompkins Square Park
Ave. A to Ave. B between Seventh & Tenth Sts.
June 2-3, free
www.howlfestival.com

The Howl! Festival returned last night to Tompkins Square Park, where it continues this weekend with a flurry of music, poetry, dance, theater, art, and “madness.” Today, as 140 artists create murals on canvases that surround the park, such groups as the Disco Monkeys and the Bowery Tones will play on the south stag. On the north stage, Honeybee House, the TriBattery Pops, Tap City, and Lydon will perform for children. Also for little ones, the Great Howl! Out Loud Kids’ Carnival will feature carnival games, arts and crafts, storytelling, and other activities. At the basketball court area, Bandera Fever! celebrates Puerto Rican heritage with Dao Y El Grupo Cemi, BombaYo, Elani Rodriguez, John Acevedo AKA Chance, J. F. Seary, Dinamicas, Senior Bomba & Plena Dancers from Grand Street Settlement, and a domino tournament. Super DJ Johnny Dynell will lead the Hot Howl! Disco Tea Dance near the General Slocum Memorial from 2:00 to 5:00, the Vangeline Theatre will perform The Raft of the Medusa, and Derrick Pendavis Xtravaganza will lead the unpredictable “Men in Skirts” dance presentation at 5:30. On Sunday, Hip Hop Howl, the Deans of Discipline, the Sic Fucks, and Bear 54, will be on the main stage, Rosie’s Theater Kids, Danny Hartig, Honeybee House, and Jack Skuller will be on the kids’ north stage, Bandera Fever! will continue with a Cultural Rumba Jam, and the festival will conclude with “Low Life 6: East Village Others,” paying tribute to the Fugs song “Nova Slum Goddess (from the Lower East Side),” Jack Smith, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the Fillmore East, Allen Ginsberg, and other old standards from the East Village circa 1966-72.

FIRST SATURDAYS: BROOKLYN BLOCK PARTY

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, JUne 2, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

For its June First Saturday program, the Brooklyn Museum will be hosting a Brooklyn Block Party, getting under way at 5:00 with live music from Son de Madre, community performers throughout the museum, and Laura Nova and Theresa Loong’s Feed Me a Story project, in which visitors can share their memories of food. At 6:00, Angelo Boyke’s 2010 documentary Hands to the Sky will be screened, followed by a Q&A with the director; Blue Marble Ice Cream founders Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas’s will give a lecture about Blue Marble Dreams, their nonprofit organization that is helping Rwandan women open the first ice-cream shop in Butare; and a museum guide will lead a tour of the museum’s unique architecture. At 6:30, Hands-on Art will teach attendees how to make a Brooklyn-style wrap for the 8:00 dance party, Society HAE’s “Beats, Blocks & Brooklyn,” featuring DJ crew the Ahficionados with Jasmine Solano. At 7:00, a museum guide will lead the tour “Summer Fun,” and “Raw/Cooked artist Heather Hart will talk about her installation, “The Eastern Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off the Mother,” and invite visitors to take part in various activities. In addition to the dance party at 8:00, visitors can pose for a portrait taken by photographers Jamel Shabazz, Lafotographeuse, Delphine Fawundu-Buford, and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn. And at 9:00, Suleiman Osman will discuss her book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. As always, the galleries will be open late, giving everyone plenty of opportunity to check out “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” “Playing House,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” “Question Bridge: Black Males,” “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company,” and “Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets.”

THE FESTIVAL OF RUSSIAN ARTS

Yuri Kara’s adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is part of Russian festival examining literature, film, and more

Multiple locations throughout Manhattan
Through June 6
Admission: free
causaartium.org

The inaugural Festival of Russian Arts is under way, comprising special events around the city through June 6. Officially subtitled “New York’s Entry into the Rich and Dynamic World of Russian Art and Culture,” the festival includes film screenings, literary readings, panel discussions, and receptions. On Saturday, May 26, at 4:00, playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich, translator John Freedman, and director Tamilla Woodard will participate in “I Won! A Staged Reading and Open Discussion” at the Little Times Square Theatre, featuring a pair of one-act, one-woman shows, I Won! and Natasha’s Dream. On May 29 at 5:30, Pulinovich will join Irina Bogatyreva, Polina Klyukina, and moderator Jenny Lyn Bader for the talk “Shattered Icons: The Demise of Heroes in America and Russia” at the New York Public Library’s Berger Forum. On May 31, Cathy Nepomnyashchy will lead the discussion “Writers at the Flashpoint: New Russian Writing & the Riddle of the Caucasus” at the Connor Room at the Mid-Manhattan Library with Arslan Khasavov, Alisa Ganieva, and Sergei Shargunov. From June 1 to June 6, “Diverging Perspectives: Filming Russian Literature in Russia and in the West” will screen various versions of such literary classics as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (by Richard Brooks, Petr Zelenka, and Ivan Pyryev), Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat (by Alberto Lattuada, Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, Aleksey Batalov, and Michael McCarthy), and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (by Yuri Kara, Paul Bryers, and Andrzej Wajda) at the Tribeca Grand Cinema and the NYU Cantor Film Center, with talks before and after most presentations. On June 2, Martin Amis and Olga Slavnikova will discuss “Side by Side: A Conversation with Writers from Different Worlds” in the NYPL’s South Court Auditorium, moderated by Leonard Lopate. All events are free and open to the public.

SUNDAY SESSIONS: TARYN SIMON

Taryn Simon examines her new photography installation at MoMA and will discuss it on May 13 at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A LIVING MAN DEAD AND OTHER CHAPTERS I-XVIII
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, May 14, $10, 12 noon – 6:00
718-784-2084
www.ps1.org

As it prepares for its summer Warm Up series, MoMA PS1’s final Sunday Sessions program will be held on May 13. In addition to your last chance to see the exhibitions “Darren Bader: Images” and “Kraftwerk ― Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” both of which close on Monday, legendary DJ Afrika Bambaataa will pay tribute to the German electronic music pioneers from 3:00 to 6:00 in the Performance Dome. Also at 3:00, artbook @ moma ps1 will host the book discussion group “A Short Course on Resistance.” Food will be available from Long Island City favorites M. Wells, and the exhibitions “Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out,” “Max Brand: no solid footing ― (trained) duck fighting a crow,” “Rania Stephan,” and “Frances Stark: My Best Thing” will also be open. We’re most looking forward to the 2:00 conversation between native New York artist Taryn Simon and MoMA PS1 associate curator Jenny Schlenzka on the occasion of the publication of Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII, the catalog to the exhibition currently on view in MoMA’s photography wing. Native New Yorker Simon, whose “Contraband” filled the Lever House lobby in late 2010 with thousands of photos of items that were confiscated at JFK International Airport, has now turned her attention on bloodlines, cataloging families from around the world, organizing them in very specific order, accompanied by photos of documents and other paraphernalia relating to their story. Nine of the chapters can be seen at MoMA, including the Indian Yadav clan, which is fighting to regain land they lost when Shivdutt Yadav was wrongly listed as being deceased; the Ondijos of Kenya, where HIV/AIDS doctor Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo has nine wives, thirty-two children, and sixty-three grandchildren; the sadly small Mehićs and Nukićs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims of genocide; the Chinese family of Su Qijian, declared by China’s State Council Information Office as the best representative of multigenerational Chinese bloodlines; and a large group of children living in a Ukrainian orphanage. Simon also spends one chapter depicting dozens of Australian rabbits used for experimentation that ultimately died during the tests or were later euthanized. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, which continues at MoMA through September 3, is a fascinating, involving collection of photographs of life and death, of science and politics, of the known and the unknown, intricately organized and arranged to create a complex, compelling visual narrative.