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.
As soon as Stefano Savano heard about the people’s rebellion going on in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in January, the Italian filmmaker grabbed his camera and headed over to Cairo, where he had been many times before over the previous twenty years, and just started filming what he saw. As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians flooded the area, singing, protesting, and demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down, Savano followed around various individuals and groups, including Elsayed, Noha, and Ahmed, getting them to share their thoughts on revolution and change, capturing intimate moments of their fight for freedom. When violence erupts, Savano fearlessly heads to the source, rocks flying through the air, bleeding men being carried past him. The film has no narration and no textual information; instead, Savano places the viewer right in the middle of the action, as if we’re there with him in Tahrir Square. “I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one,” Savano pointed out in a Skype press conference following a New York Film Festival preview screening of the film last year. Over the course of two weeks last summer, Savano and Penelope Botroluzzi edited down thirty-five hours of visuals and twenty-five hours of sound into this ninety-minute inside look at democracy in action, although it does get repetitive in the second half. Once again Savona, whose previous films include 2002’s A Border of Mirrors, 2006’s Notes from a Kurdish Rebel, and last year’s Spezzacatene, focuses more on the human element than the political, adding a coda during the credits that places much of what went on before into intriguing perspective. Tahrir: Liberation Square will be screening June 11-17 as part of the Maysles Institute’s Documentary in Bloom series curated by Livia Bloom.
In 1954, the St. Louis Housing Authority completed a massive urban renewal project, Pruitt-Igoe, a thirty-three-building complex for low-income families that was like a city unto itself. Eighteen years later, mired in crime, violence, poverty, and horrifically unsanitary and unsafe conditions, Pruitt-Igoe was torn down, the implosion famously being shown on news channels around the country as an example of the failure of public policy planning. The short, contentious history of Pruitt-Igoe is explored in the revealing documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Director Chad Freidrichs (Jandek on Corwood, First Impersonator) revisits Pruitt-Igoe through archival footage, new interviews, and a drive past the site where the iconic housing development, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, once stood, revealing the fascinating story of what was first a symbol of the post-WWII boom and then a prime example of the nation’s financial and racial problems of the 1970s. “It was like an oasis in the desert,” Ruby Russell remembers. “I never thought I would live in that kind of a surrounding.” But Brian King, who spent his childhood there, sees it a little differently. “It was hell on earth,” he says. Freidrichs speaks with urban historians Robert Fishman and Joseph Heathcott, sociologist Joyce Ladner, and former residents as they chronologically follow the rise and fall of “the poor man’s penthouse.” Narrated by actor Jason Henry, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells a shameful chapter in American history, one that should still be used today as a blueprint on what not to do. “It seemed to me that we were being penalized for being poor,” says former resident Jacqueline Williams. “That caused so much anger.” Named Best Documentary at several festivals and winner of the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is screening for free at BAMcinématek on June 11 at 6:50, followed by a panel discussion with Freidrichs and urban housing and development experts.