Steve Earle and special guests will celebrate Woody Guthrie’s centennial at City Winery this week
CELEBRATION OF WOODY GUTHRIE’S 100th BIRTHDAY
City Winery
155 Varick St.
July 11-13, $60-$80, 8:00
212-608-0555
www.citywinery.com
One hundred years ago this Saturday, folk-singing legend Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. In his too-brief career — he died from Huntington’s Disease in 1967 in Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens at the age of fifty-five, his ashes sprinkled in the ocean at Coney Island — he created a lasting legacy that proved that music can make a difference in changing socioeconomic and -political times. His 1940 album, Dust Bowl Ballads, is still a primer for the folk movement, containing such songs as “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore,” “Vigilante Man,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” and “Blowin’ Down This Road.” This week City Winery will pay tribute to Woodrow Wilson Guthrie — yes, he was named after the New Jersey governor who was soon to become president — with the centennial celebration WoodyFest, part of a yearlong series of concerts put together with the Grammy Museum, the Woody Guthrie Archives, and the Guthrie family. The three-day event will be hosted by actor, author, activist, and folk troubadour Steve Earle, who is a kind of illegitimate son of Guthrie and Hank Williams. On July 11, Earle will be joined by John Hammond, Tim Robbins, and Diana Jones, followed on July 12 by Rachael Yamagata, the Wood Brothers, and Allen Toussaint and July 13 by Billy Bragg, Amy Helm, and Joe Purdy, with more to come. Be sure to study up on those other verses of “This Land Is Your Land,” because there’s sure to be a sing-along of the whole song.
Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. The film was previously shown at the Maysles Institute this past January, but it’s now back for a return engagement July 11, with Rembert and Ducat participating in a Q&A following the screening of this extraordinary story.
A soap-opera melodrama that morphs into an erotic thriller, Secret Love tells the intense story of a complex and dangerous love triangle in modern-day Korea. Shortly after a whirlwind courtship, Yeon’s (Yoon Jin-seo) new husband, Jin-woo (Yoo Ji-tae), lapses into a coma that he might never awake from. Yeon is soon shocked to meet Jin-woo’s twin brother, Jin-ho (also played by Yoo Ji-tae), who recently emerged from a coma himself. As Yeon and Jin-ho grow closer, their relationship threatens to go to the next level — but when Jin-woo suddenly and unexpectedly arises from his coma, the love triangle becomes overwhelmed by betrayal, uncontrollable passion, and mistaken identity. Directed by Kwon Ji-yeon and cowriter Ryoo Hoon-I (who penned the screenplay with Park Hyun-soo), Secret Love, which is also known as The Secret River, uses water as an underlying motif, with many scenes taking place over a river, in the shower or bath, or at an aquarium. Although it begins slowly and sappy, the film picks up speed as hidden passions explode and danger lurks at every twist and turn. Secret Love is screening for free July 10 at