twi-ny recommended events

WINTER’S EVE AT LINCOLN SQUARE 2010

Broadway from 59th to 66th Sts.
Monday, November 29, 5:30
Admission: free but please bring can of food to Dante Park for City Harvest
www.winterseve.org

The Lincoln Square Business Improvement District’s eleventh annual Winter’s Eve party takes place on Monday, November 29, featuring live performances, food tastings, children’s activities, ice sculptures, street musicians, holiday singalongs, and much more. The festivities begin at 5:30 in Dante Park with the tree-lighting ceremony, with John Pizzarelli handling the honors this year. Chia’s Dance Party will get booties shaking in Dante Park at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00, the Brazilian percussion ensemble Harlem Samba will do the same in Richard Tucker Park at the same times, violinist supreme Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul will be playing in the Winter’s Eve Dance Tent at 6:15 and 7:30, the Anat Cohen Quartet with Avishai Cohen will be joined by Pizzarelli for shows at 6:45 and 7:45 at the American Folk Art Museum, the David Rubenstein Atrium will host a Holiday Bhangra Party featuring Red Baraat at 7:00, Jane Seymour will sign copies of AMONG ANGELS at the Borders in the Time Warner Center at 7:00, Naturally 7 will highlight a cappella holiday songs at the Apple Store at 7:00, the Rose Rutledge Trio will play in the Time Warner Center at 7:30, and the Alice Farley Dance Theater will create site-specific pieces in front of Alice Tully Hall all night long, in addition to performances by the Hungry March Band, Mariachi Real de Mexico, Arm-of-the-Sea, the Raya Brass Band, the West Side Y’s Kids, the Youth Pride Chorus, and others. And the New York Institute of Technology will present the multimedia Festival of Lights in its auditorium. All events are free, although the food tastings will require small payments; however, the Lincoln Square BID asks that everyone bring a can of food to donate to City Harvest in exchange for all of the free fun.

MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE 2010

The pilgrims arrive for another Turkey Day in NYC (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The pilgrims arrive for another Turkey Day in NYC, hoping this year not to get wet (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

77th St. & Central Park West to 34th St. & Seventh Ave.
Thursday, November 25, free, 9:00 am – 12 noon
212-494-4495
www.macys.com

In 1924, a bunch of Macy’s employees joined forces and held the first Macy’s Christmas Parade, as it was then known. This year Macy’s celebrates the eighty-fourth edition of this beloved American event. (For those of you going crazy trying to figure out how 1924 to 2010 makes 84, the parade was canceled from 1942 through 1944 because of World War II.) This year’s lineup features such floats as the Pillsbury Doughboy, Kung Fu Panda, “Super Cute” Hello Kitty, Kermit the Frog, Horton the Elephant, Spider-Man, Snoopy, and Pikachu along with such floats as 123 Sesame Street, Jolly Polly Pirate Ship, Elves Raise the Roof, Dora’s Christmas Carol Adventure, and Mount Rushmore’s American Pride, all essentially advertising for your holiday dollars. Also participating in the fun will be a dozen marching bands, tens of thousands of cheerleaders, the Big Apple Circus, the U.S. Pizza Team, lots and lots of clowns, and lip-synched performances by such celebrities as India.Arie, Jimmy Fallon & the Roots, Miranda Cosgrove, Arlo Guthrie, Kylie Minogue, Eric Hutchinson, Jessica Simpson, Michael Grimm, Gladys Knight, Kanye West, and various Broadway musical casts.

To get a head start on the parade, head on over to Central Park West and Columbus Ave. between 77th & 81st Sts. the day before, November 24, from approximately 3:00 to 10:00 to check out the Big Balloon Blow-up. Watching the annual inflation-eve blow-up of Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons is a growing tradition, with crowds getting bigger and bigger every year, but it’s still a thrill to see the giant characters raised from the ground, reborn every Thanksgiving to march in a parade viewed by millions and millions of people around the world.

KAWASAKI’S ROSE

Martin Huba as Pavel with Daniela Kolarova as Jana in a scene from KAWASAKI’S ROSE

KAWASAKI’S ROSE
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 24 – December 7
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.menemshafilms.com

Inspired by the success of THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning 2006 drama about the German secret police, the Czech team of writer Petr Jarchovsky and director Jan Hrebejk (DIVIDED WE FALL, BEAUTY IN TROUBLE) tackle a similar subject from a different point of view in the powerful KAWASAKI’S ROSE. After discovering that her mystery illness is not terminal cancer, Lucie (Lenka Vlasáková) returns home to her husband, Ludek (Milan Mikulcik), and daughter, Bara (Anna Simonová), only to find out that Ludek is once again seeing his former lover, Radka (Petra Hrebícková). Ludek and Radka are working on a documentary about Lucie’s father, Pavel (Martin Huba), who is about to receive the coveted Czech memory prize in honor of his work with disabled children since the Velvet Revolution. But when Lucie understandably refuses to accept Radka’s gesture of friendship, Ludek decides to get even after being given Pavel’s complete dossier, which reveals that the beloved doctor and his wife, Jana (Daniela Kolárová), have been keeping some very damaging secrets that could tear apart their family. Like THE LIVES OF OTHERS, KAWASAKI’S ROSE is a nearly flawless film, with well-drawn characters, a compelling, emotional story, and a gripping narrative structure, always offering something unexpected. The performances are uniformly excellent, the script subtle and intelligent. Curiously, the only misstep, and thankfully it’s just a minor tangent, involves the title figure, Mr. Kawasaki (Isao Onoda), a painter who was taken in by Jana’s onetime lover, anarchist sculptor Borek (Antonin Kratochvil). Kawasaki seems completely unnecessary, existing merely as a metaphor both within the film and outside it, referring to master mathematician and paper folder Toshikazu Kawasaki and his famed origami rose that flows out from the center. Hrebejk will be at Film Forum for the 7:50 show on November 27.

INTO ME SEE

The Lab Gallery at the Roger Smith Hotel
501 Lexington Ave. at 47th St.
Through Friday, November 26, free, 6:30
www.thelabgallery.com

The Lab Gallery uses the vacant storefront connected to the Roger Smith Hotel in Midtown as a place where a diverse group of artists and curators hold unique installations and performance art events. Their latest creation, INTO ME SEE, continues through the end of the week in the glassed-in space that some twenty-five thousand people pass by every day. A collaboration between Eva Perrotta and Sophie Bortolussi of Nu Dance Theater and Eva Perez De Vega Steele and Ian Gordon of e+i Architecture, INTO ME SEE is structured around a claw-footed cast-iron bathtub that sits alone in the gallery, joined by eighty thousand feet of white nylon string dangling from the ceiling. Perrotta and Bortolussi move mysteriously in and around the bathtub, the string at times appearing to be mist or condensation, offering viewers an unusual sight as they make their way to or from Grand Central. The performance runs nightly at 6:30 through Friday.

FREE ENERGY

Philly band Free Energy will be in town for two area shows this week, on either side of Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 24, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St., $15, 9:00
Friday, November 26, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth St., $15, 9:00
www.myspace.com/freeenergymusic
www.freeenergymusic.com

Philly band Free Energy, born of the remnants of Minneapolis’s Hockey Night, glory in guitar-based pop firmly based in a 1970s classic rock universe where “the streets are all safe / And you know deep down / You can find a better way,” as they sing in “Dream City.” Scott Wells, Paul Sprangers, Evan Wells, Geoff Bucknam, and Nick Shuminksy don’t care that they don’t have that indie hipster edge and that they might not go out on a limb taking chances, perfectly content to remain out on those safe streets. They know what they like, and they play it. Yes, that is indeed cowbell on the first track of the James Murphy–produced STUCK ON NOTHING (Astralwerks, May 2010). Yes, “Dark Trance” does borrow the main riff from Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.” And yes, Free Energy was joined by tour mates Titus Andronicus at a recent Atlanta gig for a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m Going Down.” So what? You all know you blast CT or the Boss when you’re driving down the highway or through the suburbs anyway, so why not hear it in downtown Manhattan or Brooklyn? Free Energy will keep on keepin’ on at the Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday and the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Friday, with Foxy Shazam and Hollerado.

MILESTONE FILMS: 20 FOR 20 — KILLER OF SHEEP

KILLER OF SHEEP is part of twentieth anniversary of Milestone Films at the IFC Center

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
November 24-28
Series runs through March 27
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.killerofsheep.com

Founded in 1990 by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller as a way to preserve great orphaned works, Milestone Films is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a series of weekend screenings at the IFC Center. The festival began November 12-14 with Luchino Visconti’s ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS and November 19-21 with Michael Powell’s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD and continues this weekend with Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, KILLER OF SHEEP, which Milestone recently restored with the soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared, setting up a wildly successful theatrical run at the IFC Center in 2007. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, KILLER OF SHEEP took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. KILLER OF SHEEP was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, THE GODFATHER, DUCK SOUP, ALL ABOUT EVE, and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. The Milestone series continues December 3-5 with Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL and December 10-12 with Gillo Pontecorvo and Maleno Malenotti’s THE WIDE BLUE ROAD.

STATUESQUE

Aaron Curry’s “Big Pink” and “Yellow Bird Boy” are among ten works in City Hall Park that comment on the history of public statuary (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

City Hall Park
Intersection of Broadway, Chambers St., Centre St., and Park Row
Through December 3
Admission: free
www.publicartfund.org/statuesque
twi-ny slideshow tour

The Public Art Fund’s current exhibition in City Hall Park, “Statuesque,” consists of ten large-scale sculptures by six international artists that look at the tradition of figurative sculpture in different ways. “We’re sort of working in an uncanny oscillation between likeness and abstraction, sort of living history in reverse,” Californian Matthew Monahan said at a Public Art Fund talk about the exhibit in March, “so that sculpture’s walking backwards from abstraction back into a sort of lovely mortal skin.” Monahan’s “Nation Builder” plays off the military statue, as a man carrying a huge weapon and missing the bottom of his legs stands atop two disjointed cubes. English artist Thomas Houseago’s “Red Man” and “Lumpy Figure” are a far cry from classical Greek sculpture, eschewing smoothness for, well, lumpiness, while Polish sculptor Pawel Althamer’s aluminum “Sylwia” strikes an erotic pose lying across the grass. Texas native Aaron Curry creates brightly colored abstract figures reminiscent of Alexander Calder in such pieces as “Big Pink” and “Yellow Bird Boy,” while Pakistani Huma Babha takes on the classic pose of a famous man sitting proudly in a chair in “The Orientalist,” creating a decrepit bronze Dorian Gray character. And London’s Rebecca Warren contributes an out-of-proportion comic-book-like figure in “Large Concretised Monument to the Twentieth Century,” which actually stands guard at one of the park’s entrances, warning everyone who enters that they are not going to be seeing the usual kind of honorary monuments that can be found in parks. The exhibit also includes a cell phone audio tour, with the specific numbers on the green sign accompanying each work.