twi-ny recommended events

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.

HANK & CUPCAKES

Hank & Cupcakes will bring the beat to Brooklyn Bowl on Tuesday night (photo by Alan Lugo)

Brooklyn Bowl
61 Wythe Ave.
Tuesday, November 23, free, 8:00
www.brooklynbowl.com
www.myspace.com/hankandcupcakes

You never know quite what to expect at a Hank & Cupcakes show, but you can be sure it’ll be one crazy time. The Brooklyn-based experimental duo of husband-and-wife team Ariel Scherbacovsky and Sagit Shir come from all over the musical and geographic map. Both were born in Israel, Hank spent part of his childhood in Australia, Cupcakes studied classical music for six years, they were once in an acoustic band that specialized in Beatles tunes, and they spent time in Havana together checking out the local music scene. Named after Charles Bukowski characters, Hank plays bass and electronics, with Cupcakes on drums and lead vocals, and what lead vocals they are: Cupcakes sings with a dynamic range, belting out everything from funky R&B (“Ain’t No Love”) to dance rock (“Pleasure Town”) to lovely, soulful pop ballads (“New Day,” “Roses”), her voice always front and center. When she blasts out, “You want out but you’re losing control / You gotta go but you can’t say no to the beat,” well, you won’t be able to say no to the beat. And just when you think you have them all figured out, they’ll hit you with a cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control.” Hank & Cupcakes will be at Brooklyn Bowl on November 23 for a free show with Kenan Bell and Biker Daughter.

LEE FRIEDLANDER: AMERICA BY CAR

Lee Friedlander, “Montana, 2008,” gelatin silver print (collection of the artist, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, © Lee Friedlander)

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through November 28, $12-$18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

Since the late 1990s, Washington-born photographer Lee Friedlander has been taking pictures out rental-car windows using his Hasselblad Superwide as he drove through most of the fifty states. That extensive road trip is now documented in a thrilling exhibition at the Whitney, “America by Car” (through November 28), comprising 192 fifteen inches by fifteen inches square black-and-white images closely arranged in two rows in the museum’s mezzanine level. Identified only by city and/or state and year, the photos are packed with visual information yet work on their own as abstract geometric patterns, with the steering wheel, side and rearview mirrors, door handles, windows, and other automobile elements playing a part in Friedlander’s gorgeous framing. The show is arranged by subject matter, including shots of people, churches, stop signs, houses, industrial areas, trees, ice-cream stores, empty highways, and other cars, combining to form a snapshot of a primarily timeless America. Friedlander, now seventy-six, sometimes shows himself in the mirrors while other times uses them as a counterpoint to what can be seen through the front window, combining past, present, and future, the rearview showing where we’ve been, the inside of the car representing the here and now, and the road ahead outlining where we’re going, as individuals and as a country. He even gets fancy in one Magritte-like shot in which he lines up the rearview mirror with a tree outside the window, the mirror containing the trunk of another tree that stands in for the trunk of the tree right outside. It is almost impossible to identify where the vast majority of photos were taken, making this a display of contemporary America as a whole, not of individual states. “America by Car” is best seen in two ways: First, walk down the line of photos as if you were on your own road trip, looking out the window of your car as you traverse the country. Then circle back around and enjoy each photo as unique works of art, their architectural and, at times, painterly qualities beautiful in their own right.

Sara VanDerBeek, “Treme,” chromogenic print, 2010 (courtesy of Metro Pictures and Altman Siegel Gallery, © Sara VanDerBeek 2010)

Also at the Whitney

In the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery on the first floor, Sara VanDerBeek takes another view of America in “To Think of Time” (through December 5). Using Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS as inspiration, dividing the display into “Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” and the title section, the thirty-four-year-old VanDerBeek combines photos she took of abstract sculptures she made in her studio with exterior shots taken in her hometown of Baltimore as well as in the Lower Ninth Ward of post-Katrina New Orleans, resulting in evocative, meditative examinations of time and memory, finding artistic beauty in devastation. Also on view are “Collecting Biennials” (through November 28), “Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective” (through January 9), “Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman: Shadow” (through January 23), “Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork” (through February 13), and “Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time” (through April 10).

CHERRY VANILLA: LICK ME

Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle
1972 Broadway at 66th St.
Monday, November 22, free, 7:30
212-595-6859
www.barnesandnoble.com
www.cherry-vanilla.com

Poet, actress, songwriter, publicist, Mad woman, and all-around good-time girl Cherry Vanilla holds nothing back in her free-wheeling memoir, LICK ME: HOW I BECAME CHERRY VANILLA (Chicago Review Press, November 2010, $24.95). Born Kathleen Anne Dorritie in 1943 and raised in Queens, Vanilla tells of a life filled with lots of sex, lots of drugs, and lots of rock & roll. A chronic bedwetter as a child, she later developed OCD, picking at cuts and blemishes all over her body. She dreamed of being in show business, first working at Madison Ave. advertising firms before getting involved in the burgeoning downtown arts scene, hanging out at the hottest clubs and enjoying a never-ending stream of lovers. She starred in Warhol’s off-Broadway show PORK and went from groupie to music publicist to poet and performer; her stories about working with David Bowie just as he was trying to break through in the States are intimate and revealing — and might come as quite a surprise for longtime Bowie fans. She talks in-depth about her desire to bed such men as Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Leon Russell, and Bowie — but you’ll have to read the book to find out which attempts were successful. Among the many celebrities she meets in her ever-evolving career, some who became close friends, others just passing through her wild life, are Mick Jagger, Patti Smith, Joel Schumacher, Debbie Harry, Helmut Newton, Joni Mitchell, Don Johnson, Melanie Griffith, Sting, Candy Darling, Ringo Starr, Angie Bowie, Rudolf Nureyev, May Pang, and Mick Ronson, and she shares some very interesting details about many of them. But Vanilla never comes off as needlessly gossipy or self-aggrandizing; instead, LICK ME is an honest portrait of a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it. The book also includes excerpts from her 1970s diaries and a sixteen-page black-and-white insert that features several shots of her in two of her favorite positions, either partially or fully unclothed. Cherry Vanilla will be at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble on November 22, discussing her outrageous life and signing copies of the book.