Looking to make a statement with a current or former loved one this Valentine’s Day? You might want to consider giving that (in?)significant other the latest album from Austin rockers Heartless Bastards, who will be releasing their latest, Arrow, on Partisan Records on February 14. The new disc, which features such songs as “Marathon,” “Got to Have Rock ‘N Roll,” “Only for You,” and “Low Low Low,” was produced by Spoon drummer Jim Eno; you can check out the first single, “Parted Ways,” above and pick up the bonus song “Bye Bye Baby Blues” if you preorder the album from iTunes. You can also catch the Heartless Bastards — singer/guitarist/songwriter Erika Wennerstrom, guitarist Mark Nathan, bassist Jesse Ebagh, and drummer Dave Colvin —at Webster Hall on February 24 ($20, 6:00), after you’ve gotten V-Day out of your system.
twi-ny recommended events
THE CONTENDERS 2011: INTO THE ABYSS
Werner Herzog speaks with Death Row inmate Michael Perry in INTO THE ABYSS
INTO THE ABYSS: A TALE OF DEATH, A TALE OF LIFE (Werner Herzog, 2011)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, January 19, 8:00
Series runs through January 30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.wernerherzog.com
Upon meeting convicted murderer Michael James Perry on Death Row eight days before the twenty-eight-year-old was going to be executed by the state of Texas, master filmmaker Werner Herzog tells him, “I have the feeling that destiny, in a way, has dealt you a very bad deck of cards. It does not exonerate you, and when I talk to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to like you, but I respect you, and you are a human being, and I think human beings should not be executed.” After explaining his personal view on capital punishment, Herzog then lets the rest of the compelling documentary Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life play out like a police procedural as he investigates how and why two teenage boys murdered three people in October 2001. Herzog opens the film by speaking with Death House chaplain Rev. Richard Lopez in a potter’s field graveyard, then follows that with four sections that detail the crime, the community in which it occurred, and the family members on both sides of the law affected by the grisly, senseless murders. Herzog divides the film into four primary chapters — “The Crime,” “The Dark Side of Conroe,” “Time and Emptiness,” and “A Glimmer of Hope” — as he talks with the often smiling Perry and his cohort, Jason Aaron Burkett; Lt. Damon Hall, who shares the specific aspects of the murders of Sandra Stotler, her seventeen-year-old son, Adam, and Adam’s friend Jeremy Richardson, supplemented by original crime-scene video; Charles Richardson, Jeremy’s older brother; Lisa Stotler-Balloun, Adam’s sister, who has seen more than her fair share of loss; Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who fell in love with Burkett after he was incarcerated; Delbert Burkett, Jason’s stepfather, who is also behind bars; and Captain Fred Allen, who oversaw executions in the Huntsville prison. Herzog asks penetrating but not leading questions that get the subjects to talk openly and honestly about the crime and its aftermath and their lives in general, many of which seem trapped in a vicious cycle of violence, jail, poor education, and other endless hardships. Into the Abyss is a powerful film that, because of Herzog’s extremely sensitive handling of an extremely controversial topic, is not nearly as polemical or political as it could have been. Into the Abyss, which was the opening-night gala selection of the recent Doc NYC festival, is screening January 19 at the Museum of Modern Art as part of MoMA’s “The Contenders 2011” series, which focuses on either underlooked films and/or those that MoMA believes will stand the test of time. The series continues through January 30 with Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea, Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, Wim Wenders’s Pina, and Liza Johnson’s Return.
ETHAN NICHTERN: YOUR EMOTICONS WON’T SAVE YOU
237 Lafayette St. near Spring St., tenth floor
Thursday, January 19, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.ethannichtern.com
Shastri Ethan Nichtern, a Shambhala teacher and founder of the Interdependence Project, has followed up his 2007 nonfiction trade paperback, One City, in which he examined egolessness, interdependence, enlightenment, and spirituality in a fun and fascinating way, with his fiction debut, the digital book Your Emoticons Won’t Save You. The breezy tale is set in 1998, when Alex Bardo and a group of his college-aged childhood friends are on a road trip to the camp they went to when they were kids, setting the stage for a series of memories and flashbacks about life, love, friendship, and growing up. “She looked like she was about to say something else about me, something très annoying about who I am and who I used to be and who I should become, but she didn’t,” narrator Alex says at one point about his former girlfriend. The story involves bad mix tapes, naked frolicking, car games, micro-losses of virginity, and the Wannabe Poets Brigade; the novel concludes with a selection of Alex’s poetry, featuring such titles as “A Wary Invitation to My Future Child,” “Urban Planning,” “Aw, Nuts,” and “A PostPostModern Definition of Egolessness.” If you read the fine print, you’ll discover that “aggression still tantalizes us,” “obsession’s like a bungee cord,” “delusion emits a steady hum,” “kids don’t get to make any decisions,” “parents argue over money and then slam doors shut,” “when people smile they look guilty,” and “you will become what you hate — it’s inevitable.” Nichtern will be reading from Your Emoticons Won’t Save You at a release party on January 19 at 237 Lafayette St. In addition, Ethan and his father, David Nichtern, a musician, composer, producer, Emmy winner, and senior Buddhist teacher, will be teaming up for the weekend workshop “The Art of Being Human” January 20-22 at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York.
PARSONS DANCE
The Parsons season at the Joyce includes the world premiere of ROUND MY WORLD (photo by Krista Bonura)
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
Through January 22, $10-$59
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org
www.parsonsdance.org
David Parsons and Parsons Dance enter their second week at the Joyce, performing two programs through January 22. Program A consists of the world premiere of the Joyce commission A Stray’s Lullaby by guest choreographer Kate Skarpetowska (with music by Kenji Bunch), a duet from Step into My Dream, the world premiere of Parsons’s Round My World, featuring a digital score by Zoe Keating, and the repertory pieces Caught and Swing Shift, while program B includes Envelope, Hand Dance, the excerpt from Step into My Dream, Slow Dance, and the stroboscopic Caught and Swing Shift. Continuing its mission to “deliver positive, affirming and life-enriching experiences to audiences worldwide” that it began in 1985, Parsons Dance will also be holding a Summer Intensive Workshop from May 29 to June 16 and the David Parsons Master Choreography Workshop from June 18 to 22 at the Manhattan Movement & Arts Center.
NORWEGIAN WOOD
Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) and Watanabe (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) search for love in NORWEGIAN WOOD
NORWEGIAN WOOD (NORUWEI NO MORI) (Tran Anh Hung, 2010)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Thursday, January 12, $16, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.norwegianwoodmovie.com
First it took a long time for French-Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung (Ths Scent of Green Papaya) to convince Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami to let him adapt his 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood — Tran had been interested in turning the book into a movie ever since he first read it in 1994, but Murakami notoriously does not allow his novels to become films — and then, once the film was made and played at prestigious festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Dubai, still took more than a year to find a U.S. distributor. Currently running at the IFC Center, Norwegian Wood is a moving, faithful adaptation of Murakami’s elegiac novel about unrequited love, romantic communication, and death. After his best friend, Kizuki (Kengo Kora), commits suicide, Watanabe (Death Note’s Ken’ichi Matsuyama) and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), who previously were part of an inseparable trio with Kizuki, go their separate ways. After a short time, they meet up accidentally in Tokyo, where Watanabe is attending university and Naoko is trying to get over her loss. But an event on her twentieth birthday causes Naoko to take off again, this time seeking professional help at a sanitarium. Watanabe can’t stop thinking about Naoko, jeopardizing a possible relationship with the aggressive, sexually open Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), who already has a boyfriend but is extremely interested in Watanabe. Meanwhile, Watanabe disapproves of how his friend Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama) continually cheats on his girlfriend, Hatsumi (Eriko Hatsune), who is devoted to him. With the student riots of the late 1960s swirling around them, Watanabe, Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa, Hatsumi, and Naoko’s roommate, Reiko (Reika Kirishima), take long, hard looks at what they want out of life and love, and they don’t always like what they find. Beautifully shot by Mark Lee Ping Bin (In the Mood for Love) and featuring a subtle score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood), Norwegian Wood is a slow-paced, psychologically intense drama. Watanabe and Naoko are often shown walking amid vast natural landscapes of green forests and snow-covered mountains, but they are tied up tight within themselves, trapped in their own memories. The carefully composed sex scenes give depth and intelligence to the main characters without overplaying their emotions. The story itself might be relatively slight — it lacks the range of Murakami’s later books — but Tran has done a fine job bringing it to the screen.
PAULA HAYES: LAND MIND
Paula Hayes’s “Land Mind” provides a beautiful oasis in Midtown Manhattan (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Lever House
390 Park Ave. at 54th St.
Through January 27
Admission: free
www.leverhouseartcollection.com
www.paulahayes.com
land mind slideshow
Last winter, New York-based environmental artist and landscape designer Paula Hayes installed “Nocturne of the Limax maximus” in MoMA’s lobby, a pair of terrariums — the horizontal, biomorphic “Slug” and the vertical “Egg” — that brought colorful life to the space. This winter the Massachusetts-born Hayes, who was raised on a farm in upstate New York, has done the same in the Lever House lobby gallery just a few blocks east of MoMA with “Land Mind.” On view through January 27 in the large, glassed-in lobby, “Land Mind” consists of cast silicone and EPDM rubber planters, some in the shape of dumplings, that hold tropical trees and plants; “Slug,” which is filled with succulents; and “Aquarium,” a gorgeous 240-gallon, nearly six-foot-high cast acrylic saltwater tank that is home to such fish as Bartlett’s Anthias, Black Ocellaris Clownfish, Green Chromis, Sixline Wrasse, and Yellow Coris Wrasse, such invertebrates as Blood Red Shrimp, Cleaner Shrimp, Blue Linchia Starfish, and Banded Serpent Starfish, and such corals as Neon Green Toadstool Leather Coral, Yellow Leather Coral, and Rose Bubble Tip Anemone, surrounded by a beaded “Garden Necklace” and with a “Lighting Hood” dangling above it. Hayes has installed the ecosystem so that the working parts that keep pumping clean, fresh water and shining lights into the aquarium are visible, emphasizing the living aspects of the piece while making clear how its survival requires mechanical intervention, a delicate balance between nature and humans. “Land Mind” is an oasis in Midtown Manhattan, a charming, beautiful respite that will make you forget about the concrete and asphalt madness around you. And Lever House is the perfect place for it, as the glass building is somewhat of a terrarium itself, just filled with people instead of plants and aquatic creatures.
VIDEO OF THE DAY — STEVE EARLE: NPR MUSIC TINY DESK CONCERT
STEVE EARLE & ALLISON MOORER RESIDENCY
City Winery
155 Varick St. at Vandam St.
Monday nights through February 6, $45-$65
212-608-0555
www.citywinery.com
www.steveearle.com
The always charming Steve Earle and his wife, Allison Moorer, continue their Monday-night residence at City Winery through February 6, joined on January 16 by Charlie Mars, January 23 by Mike Doughty, January 30 by the Mastersons, and February 6 by the Dust. Earle had a strong 2011, releasing the Grammy-nominated I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive (New West, April 2011) in addition to a same-titled novel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2011) and appearing in the second season of the HBO series Treme. We’ve seen Earle many times over the years, solo, with a band, and with special guests, and he always puts on a helluva show, filled with fun stage patter and both serious and wild and crazy songs.