Who:The Eli “Dr. E” Yamin Quartet What: Live Music Downstairs Where:Bond 45, 221 West Forty-Sixth St. between Seventh Ave. & Broadway, 212-689-4545 When: Sunday, October 23, no cover ($25 minimum), 7:30 Why: Broadway might be mostly dark on Sunday nights, but that doesn’t mean the Theater District isn’t hopping with some of the hottest shows at that time. In recent months, such bands as Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, the Stan Harrison Quartet, and the Mark Kostabi Trio have performed Sunday nights Downstairs at Bond 45, the popular Italian restaurant that is now located on West Forty-Sixth St. On October 23 at 7:30, the Eli “Dr. E” Yamin Quartet will take the stage for its second weekend, consisting of Eli Yamin (aka “Dr. E”) on piano and vocals, Zaid Nasser on alto sax, Elias Bailey on bass, and David F. Gibson on drums. A native of East Patchogue, Long Island, Yamin recently earned his doctorate in musical arts, specializing in jazz piano, from Stony Brook; he also cofounded and serves as managing and artistic director of Jazz Power Initiative, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to ignite the power of jazz music education and transform lives by fostering creative self-expression, community, teamwork, and diversity,” and was the founding director of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Middle School Jazz Academy.
Yamin, who has a wide range of influences, from Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie to Bach and Mozart, from Sinatra and B. B. King to Jimi Hendrix and Taj Majal, has released such albums as Louie’s Dream,I Feel So Glad,You Can’t Buy Swing, and Pushin’ 30. The good doctor will kick off his Sunday at 2:00 cohosting the free Intergenerational Jazz Power Jam: Brass Extravaganza at the National Jazz Museum of Harlem before heading down to Bond 45. He’s also a bit of a philosopher, offering these words of wisdom on his website: “You can do it if you set your mind to it. Whatever your long term goal is, whether academic, artistic, spiritual. The main thing is just like Duke Ellington said and I’ll say it again. NEVER GIVE UP.”
The Rubin’s Mandala Lab is an immersive experience that explores anger, attachment, envy, ignorance, and pride (photo courtesy Rubin Museum of Art)
FREE EXHIBITION TOUR: MANDALA LAB ANNIVERSARY
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, October 21, free, 7:15
212-620-5000 rubinmuseum.org
The Rubin Museum is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its interactive Mandala Lab with a guided tour on October 21 at 7:15 as part of its weekly free K2 Friday Night, which also includes tabla player DJ Roshni Samlal, access to all galleries, and a special cocktail menu.
In Buddhism, the mandala is a symbolic image of the universe, a painting, scroll, or sand sculpture that offers the ability to contemplate transformation and enlightenment. The Mandala Lab, subtitled “Where Emotions Can Turn to Wisdom,” consists of four quadrants of experiences that explore five afflictive emotions, or kleshas — anger, envy, pride, ignorance, and attachment — through multiple senses, each associated with a color and an element, either earth, air, fire, water, or space. The project design was inspired by the Rubin’s seventeenth-century Tibetan Sarvavid Vairochana Mandala, which contains circles and squares, the Five Wisdom Buddhas, and representations of earthly elements. “All great art helps us see each other from the inside out. But Buddhist art goes a step further,” Rubin head of programs Dawn Eshelman explains in a promotional video. “It provides a kind of visual to help us survive in uncertain times.”
In “Check Your Pride,” you place a token in a slot with such statements as “I think I am better than others” or “I feel proud of achievements I haven’t earned” while standing in front of a mirror. Palden Weinreb’s Untitled (Coalescence) gives you the chance to let go of envy by sitting on a cushion and breathing in time with a circular light sculpture that dims and glows. A touch screen allows you to share your thoughts on ignorance.
Attachment is tied to smell in an installation comprising six stations featuring videos by a half dozen visual artists accompanied by a corresponding scent. Each short video about personal memories, made by Laurie Anderson (Uncle Allen), Sanford Biggers (Joanin Temple for Mandala Lab), Tenzin Tsetan Choklay (1994), Amit Dutta (The Scent of Earth), Wang Yahui (The Smell of a Rice Field), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Waterfall), features a related scent created by master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel that you get to guess at the end of the two-minute film.
You can bang away your anger in a gong orchestra, for which composers and musicians Billy Cobham, Sheila E., Peter Gabriel, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Sarah Hennies, Huang Ruo, Shivamani, and Bora Yoon have chosen eight unique gongs and mallets, manufactured by Ryan Shelledy or Matt Nolan and made of brass, bronze, or silver nickel, that visitors are invited to activate, following these instructions: “1. Imagine your anger. 2. Gently strike the gong in front of you one time using the mallet to the right. 3. Raise the handle to the left to partially submerge the gong in the water. 4. Listen to the sound of your anger transform. 5. Let the sound fade, and for an added challenge, watch the water return to stillness. 6. When finished, lower the handle to return the gong back to its starting position.”
While at the Rubin, be sure to see the other exhibitions as well: “Gateway to Himalayan Art,” “The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room,” “Tales of Muted Spirits — Dispersed Threads — Twisted Shangri-La,” “Healing Practices: Stories from Himalayan Americans,” “Shrine Room Projects: Rohini Devasher/Palden Weinreb,” and “Masterworks: A Journey Through Himalayan Art.”
COST OF LIVING
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West Forty-Seventh St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 6, $74-$298 www.manhattantheatreclub.com
When I saw Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living at New York City Center’s Stage I five and a half years ago, I did not anticipate that it would win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. I also never imagined that the show, which I called “a tender, emotional play about four lonely people seeking connections,” would eventually transfer to Broadway. But Cost of Living has made a terrific transition to MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, with all its tenderness, emotion — and sense of humor — fully intact. In fact, it is now even better.
The play is once again directed by Obie winner Jo Bonney on Wilson Chin’s set, which rotates between the homes of John (Gregg Mozgala), a Harvard grad working on his PhD at Princeton and confined to a wheelchair with cerebral palsy, and Ani (Katy Sullivan), a quadriplegic also in a wheelchair.
While John is looking for a caregiver and interviews and hires Jess (Kara Young), a Princeton grad scrambling to make a living by working multiple jobs and who assures John that despite her slight build she can handle his needs, Ani initially refuses help from her ex-husband, Eddie (David Zayas), a former truck driver with a new girlfriend.
The play opens with Eddie sitting at a bar, talking to an unseen person in what is essentially a long, compelling monologue delivered directly to the audience. “The shit that happens is not to be understood. That’s from the Bible,” he says. “That life is good for people. I was thankful for every day they ain’t invented yet the trucker-robots. That life is good. The road. Sky. The scenery. Except the loneliness. Except in the case of all the, y’know, loneliness. This was what my wife was good for. Not that this was the only thing.”
The loneliness and vulnerability experienced by all four characters is palpable, expressed most effectively in scenes of back-to-back caretaking. In the first, Jess washes John in the shower, moving him out of his chair and then back into it, followed by Eddie giving Ani a bath.
Describing his sensations, John tells Jess that his body feels as if he’s constantly under attack. “That’s what it’s like. Under my skin. From underneath my skin. Like people hitting me from beneath my skin. And that’s what you’ll be working with. Every morning. Is touching, shaving, undressing, washing, and clothing — that. That’s what I’m like.”
Meanwhile, Eddie visits Ani on a day her nurse hasn’t shown up, so Eddie asks Ani to hire him instead. “What do you think’s gonna happen you come take care of me a few hours a day? Huh?” she spurts out. “You brush my teeth a couple mornings, dump my bedpan a few times, and BOOM, conscience — fuck-shit, clap yer hands when I say Boom. . . . Yer not doin’ penance on me.”
The separate storylines merge at the end in an uneasy finale that acknowledges that we all encounter tremendously painful issues in life, regardless of our physical or psychological situations, which is further established during the curtain call.
Both Mozgala (Teenage Dick,Diagnosis of a Faun), who has cerebral palsy, and Sullivan (The Long Red Road,Finish Line), who was born without lower legs, return from the original cast, and both give intense, superb performances again, neither one pulling any punches. Young (Clyde’s,Halfway Bitches Go to Heaven) displays a tenacious fragility as Jess, who might be getting in over her head, while Zayas (Dexter,Anna in the Tropics) proves once more that he is one of New York City’s finest actors, balancing toughness with a sweet gentleness that shines through. Jeff Croiter’s lighting and Rob Kaplowitz’s sound capture the pervasive loneliness playing out onstage.
“Self-pity has little currency in these characters’ worlds. Humor, however, has much,” Majok (Ironbound,Sanctuary City) explains in a script note. Her and Bonney’s (Father Comes Home from the Wars,Fucking A) approach feels honest and unambiguous, as summarized in this exchange between Jess and John:
Jess: Sorry, I never worked with the, differently-abled — John: Don’t do that. Jess: What? John: Don’t call it that. Jess: Why, I — John: Don’t call it differently-abled. Jess: Shit, is that not the right term? John: It’s fucking retarded. . . . Jess: So what do I, how do I, refer to you? John: Are you planning on talking about me? Jess: No. John: Why not? I’m very interesting.
The Broadway debut of Cost of Living, which was expanded from Majok’s 2015 short play John, Who’s Here from Cambridge, is a lot more than interesting, and you’ll be sure to be talking about it long after seeing it.
In his seminal 1972 book Ways of Seeing, British essayist, novelist, and cultural thinker John Berger writes, “According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. . . . The promised power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual — but its object is always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. . . . By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste — indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.”
American filmmaker Nina Menkes forever changes the way you’ll see and experience movies in her eye-opening documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power. “As a filmmaker and as a woman, I found myself drowning in a powerful vortex of visual language from which it is very difficult to escape,” she explains at the beginning of the film, an adaptation of her illustrated lecture “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression.” Producer and director Menkes, whose filmography includes Queen of Diamonds,Magdalena Viraga, and Dissolution, speaks with sixteen women and two men and shows clips from more than one hundred and twenty-five films as she reveals how much the movie industry is reliant on the male gaze, creating fantasy spaces that celebrate men while objectifying women.
Dartmouth filmmaker and faculty member Iyabo Kwayana posits, “I think we have to consider that it is through the formal visual language that we are effectively communicating meaning, and we inherit so much subliminally that comes from this language and it has to do with how shots are composed and framed, how they’re assembled and ordered in a sequence of shots. All of that becomes the grammar and syntax by which meaning is conveyed to a viewer. So in a visual culture such as ours, in which there is a ravenous appetite towards the female as object, if the camera is predatory, then the culture is predatory as well.”
Menkes divides her talk into five sections that comprise what she calls “The List”: “Subject/Object,” “Framing,” “Camera Movement,” “Lighting,” and “Narrative Position.” Among the films she examines are The Lady from Shanghai,Super Fly,Contempt,Carrie,Lost in Translation,Cuties,Crazy Rich Asians,Sleeping Beauty,Do the Right Thing,Blade Runner 2049, and The Silence of the Lambs, revealing how ingrained it is to depict men and women differently, what Transparent producer, writer, and director Joey Soloway calls “propaganda for patriarchy.” Director and activist Maria Giese adds, “Hollywood has been the worst violator of Title VII [part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act] of any industry in the United States — even worse than coal mining.”
Actress Rosanna Arquette shares the abuse she suffered at the hands of Harvey Weinstein as well as the regrets she has about a nude scene she did in After Hours. Menkes includes nude scenes throughout the film, involving Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Nicole Kidman, and many other familiar stars, describing how they can be “attacks on our selfhood.” She demonstrates how the use of slow motion focuses on a woman’s erotic sensuality but a man’s power and violence. Menkes also explores how the depiction of women on celluloid impacts sexual abuse.
Global Media Center for Social Impact founder Sandra de Castro Buffington asks, “How is rape culture normalized? There are really three key elements that we see on the screen and in real life. One is the objectification of women’s bodies. Another is the glamorization of sexual assault, especially on the screen. And the third is disregard for women’s rights and safety, even if a hand is not laid on another person. These are all of the elements that create an environment that allows one group to gain and maintain power over another.”
California State University faculty member Rhiannon Aarons expounds, “I think this visual language really contributes to female self-hatred and insecurity in a way that is not insignificant. What is normalized as beauty is really seen specifically and dominantly through a male gaze. I think that really changes how we relate in the world in general and not necessarily in the best way.”
Menkes spends extra time delving into such films as Raging Bull,Bombshell, and Mandingo, demonstrating how women’s voices are silenced and power dynamics are ingrained in visual storytelling. She uses a critical scene from Portrait of a Lady on Fire to display how director Céline Sciamma exposes that subject-object power dynamic and turns it around. Among the other women providing important insight are psychoanalyst Dr. Sachiko Take-Reece, writer Jodi Lampert, UCLA Film and Television Archive director May Hong HaDuong, intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, producer-director Amy Ziering, cinematographer Nancy Schreiber, author Maya Montanez Smukler, film theorist Laura Mulvey, filmmakers Julie Dash, Eliza Hittman, Catherine Hardwicke, and Penelope Spheeris, and foley artist and activist Lara Dale, who said no to sexual exploitation, effectively ending her career as an actress. Two snippets from a “Sex and Power Talk Discussion” at the California Institute of the Arts feel extraneous, but every other minute of Brainwashed is riveting.
The film is insightfully edited by Cecily Rhett and smartly shot by Shana Hagan, with a compelling score by Sharon Farber; Menkes purposely hired women to head the major departments, something she points out that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow did not do on The Hurt Locker.
Reflecting on her 2007 feature Phantom Love, Menkes says, “All of my own narrative fiction films have been centrally concerned with expressing the abject feminine — and the wound that is carried deep inside.” We still have a long way to go to heal that wound, but Brainwashed sets us on a path to affect the way we see and interpret cinema. As actor and comedian Charlyne Li tells us, “There’s a saying that people say that if people were to get rid of all the sexual predators that there would be no film industry.”
Brainwashed opens October 20 at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, with Q&As with Menkes at the 7:00 screenings on October 20 (moderated by critic and podcaster Violet Lucca) and October 21 and with Geise and director and programmer Dara Messinger on October 22.
Nightmare: Gothic offers Victorian scares on the Lower East Side (photo by Joshua Hoffine)
NIGHTMARE: GOTHIC
Teatro SEA @ the Clemente
107 Suffolk St. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
October 17-31, $30 GA, $45 VIP, 6:00 – 11:00 pm nightmarenyc.com
Nobody loves Halloween scares quite as much as the folks at Psycho Clan do. For twenty years, cofounders Timothy Haskell and Paul Smithyman have been presenting varieties of immersive haunted house experiences as well as other holiday-themed (mis)adventures, including Nightmare Haunted House,This Is Real,Full Bunny Contact, and SANTASTICAL. Their latest horror presentation is Nightmare: Gothic, a half-hour immersion set amid Victoriana macabre, running October 17-31 at Teatro SEA @ the Clemente on the Lower East Side. The hunt is on to locate a missing child, but there are frightening barriers every step of the way.
“People have a very specific idea when they think ‘Goth’ and it is mostly of the romantic goth genre,” Haskell said in a statement. “We are, however, inspired by the Victorian Goth era. Think mid to late nineteenth century. Think Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kafka, the contemporary work of Edward Gorey, corsets, dark purples and black, hoop skirts, parasols . . . you get the idea.”
Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is part of “Vampire Weekends” midnight series at IFC
THIRST (Park Chan-wook, 2009)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, October 14, and Saturday, October 15, midnight
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com
Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is a different kind of vampire movie. Inspired by Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, the creepy Korean flick stars Song Kang-ho (The Host,Memories of Murder) as Sang-hyun, a friendly priest who volunteers to participate in a dangerous experimental program that is attempting to develop a vaccine for a deadly virus. Unfortunately, he succumbs to the disease, his body covered in nasty boils, but he surprisingly arises, reborn, with a deep desire to suck some blood. However, he still is the same friendly priest with a moral soul, so he is unwilling to kill to fill his belly. As he gains superhuman strength, he grows closer to Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), the virtually imprisoned adopted sister / wife of a goofy childhood friend (Shin Ha-kyun) who is cared for by his doting mother (Kim Hae-sook). But as Sang-hyun and Tae-ju get hot and heavy — one particular sex scene is among the hottest in a good movie since Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue in 1986 — their thirst threatens to overwhelm them and everyone around them. Eschewing standard vampire lore — don’t look for garlic, crucifixes, bats, wooden stakes, or a Van Helsing-like character — Park (Joint Security Area, the Vengeance trilogy) examines the complex spirituality and sexuality of a man of the cross, a figure always dressed in black (reminiscent of Count Dracula) who is forced to challenge his faith and humanity. At 133 minutes, Thirst is a half hour too long, with several scenes that could have served as an ending, but hang in there; no one can tell a story like Park Chan-wook, even if he is an acquired taste — like, say, blood.
Thirst is screening at midnight on October 14 and 15 in the IFC Center series “Vampire Weekends,” consisting of half a dozen horror favorites being shown in conjunction with the release of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire on AMC/AMC+. The series continues through November 5 with Tony Scott’s The Hunger, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk til Dawn, and Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned. Park’s latest film, Decision to Leave, which earned him Best Director honors at Cannes, was a selection of the sixtieth New York Film Festival and opens at Lincoln Center on October 19.
A trio of nurses deal with a deadly epidemic in early Guy Maddin cult classic, Tales form the Gimli Hospital
TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL (REDUX) (Guy Maddin, 1988/2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, October 14
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com zeitgeistfilms.com
In a 2011 twi-ny talk focusing on a “reframed” version of his 1988 debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Canadian director Guy Maddin said, “I thought, of all the films of mine that might actually thematically justify a revisiting from the director (something that truly ought not to be done under almost any circumstances!), then this was the title.” Well, Maddin has done it again with a 4K restoration of the film, which he is now calling Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux), featuring some trimming as well as the addition of a long-lost scene.
The Canadian DIY master reached into Icelandic sagas for the original, ultra-low-budget version. In many ways a kind of Scandinavian Frankenstein as if directed by Ingmar Bergman and George A. Romero, the mostly black-and-white Expressionist film is a story within a story (at times within another story) that an old woman, Amma (Margaret Anne MacLeod), is telling her grandchildren (Heather and David Neale) in a hospital room where their mother lies very ill. The dark, lurid fairy tale, set in “a Gimli we no longer know,” is about Einar the Lonely (assistant director Kyle McCulloch), a shy fish smoker who does not know how to relate to other people, particularly women. Felled by an epidemic, he is brought to the Gimli Hospital in Manitoba, where other men battle this dread disease, which leaves stitchlike scars on their face and body. Einar is discouraged that the patient in the bed next to him, the portly Gunnar (Michael Gottli), is treated much nicer by the nurses than he is, but he is helpless to do anything about it. Gunnar is soon telling Einar the story of his true love, Snjófridur (Angela Heck), a tragic tale with a surprising twist that brings everything full circle.
A unique visual stylist who regularly pays homage to the early days of cinema, Maddin, who directed and edited the picture (and wrote the script on Post-it Notes), purposely keeps things low-tech, including less-than-perfect sound dubbing and bumpy cuts, incorporating freak-show-like oddities alongside an ominous lo-fi soundtrack with old songs; Maddin (My Winnipeg,Careful) himself plays the weirdo surgeon who operates on Gunnar and Einar in rather strange fashion. The intentionally amateurish nature of the original work led to its being rejected by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for ineptitude; it went on to become an instant cult classic, holding the midnight-movie slot at the Quad for nearly a year. In 2011, Maddin, who is part Icelandic, reimagined the film in the special Performa presentation Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed, a reedited version with a live score by Icelandic musicians. Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux), a 4K restoration that premiered at TIFF 2022, goes a few steps further.
“The new scene was shot in 1999 as an after-the-fact deleted scene as a way of celebrating a cast reunion after a serious car accident injured the actor Michael Gottli,” Maddin explains. “The act of shooting this scene was intended as a kind of rehab therapy for my dispirited thespian. But it turned out quite well, I think. It is inserted early on in the feature, during the scene in the hospital when a primitive Punch and Judy puppet show is deployed as an anesthetic distraction to a patient (Gottli) having his leg operated on by a man wielding a sickle. Such puppet shows were the only anesthetic available in the pioneer days of Gimli. The new scene suggests to the patient a hallucinated tale of gender transformation and some lusty BDSM involving yet another man with a fish net. I had promised Gottli I would insert this ‘deleted scene’ into the body of the feature if I ever got the chance.”
This stunning new iteration opens theatrically October 14 at IFC, preceded by Maddin’s dazzling six-minute award-winning TIFF short The Heart of the World, about science battling religion and two brothers in love with the same woman as the end of the planet approaches, with the director on hand for Q&As following the 8:10 shows on Friday and Saturday night. Maddin is both fascinating and fun to listen to, so snag your tickets now for what promises to be a special event.
