twi-ny recommended events

NEW YORK CITY APPLE DAY

The New York apple will be celebrated at street fair on Orchard St. on Sunday



APPLES ON ORCHARD
Orchard St. between Broome & Grand Sts.
Sunday, September 26, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-226-9010
www.lowereastsideny.com

Some three hundred and sixty-three years ago, Peter Stuyvesant planted an apple tree on Thirteenth & Third, and New York has been identified with the healthy fruit ever since. On Sunday, the Lower East Side Business Improvement District will be sponsoring the annual New York City Apple Day, held in the general location where French farmer James De Lancey Sr.’s apple orchard thrived back in the eighteenth century. The afternoon will include live performances by Grandma Fantasy, Tyrone Noonan Band, Cows Like Shrimp with Sefton Stallard, and Stella Winkelman of Bell Book and Scandal; the Mark Miller Gallery will be sponsoring an art activities table for kids; and such restaurants as Café Katja, Bunny Chow, and Georgia’s Eastside BBQ will be serving dishes featuring apples. Among the other participants are An Choi, the Henry Street Settlement, Biscuits by Lambchop, the New Museum, the LES Ecology Center, Red Jacket Orchards, the Tenement Museum, and Newtown Pippin.

MUSEUM DAY

Multiple venues
Admission: free with printed ticket
www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday

The sixth annual Free Museum Day, sponsored by Smithsonian magazine, takes place on Saturday, September 25, with institutions all over the country opening their doors to people who have downloaded a free ticket for two from the above website. There’s only one ticket allowed per household/e-mail address, so be careful before filling out the online form; some of the museums are free anyway, either all the time or on Saturdays, while others might be between exhibits so there won’t be all that much to see. The participating venues in the five boroughs are the American Folk Art Museum, Asia Society, the Bartow-Pell Mansion, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum, the Children’s Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, El Museo del Barrio, the Fraunces Tavern Museum, Historic Richmond Town, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden, the Museum of American Finance, the Society of Illustrators, the Museum of Arts & Design, Museum of the City of New York, the New Museum, the New York City Fire Museum, the New York Transit Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, the Queens Botanical Garden, the Queens Historical Society, the Queens Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum of Art, the South Street Seaport Museum, the Staten Island Museum, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the Center for Book Arts, the Drawing Center, the Hispanic Society of America, the Jewish Museum, the Morgan Library, the Museum at FIT, the Noble Maritime Collection, the Noguchi Museum, the Skyscraper Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Ukrainian Museum, and the Vilcek Foundation. Of course, if you pair up with friends and relatives, you can get more tickets for different places.

DELUSION

Laurie Anderson is back at BAM with another multimedia examination of the personal and the political (photo by Leland Brewster)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
Through October 3, $20-$60
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Examining the twenty years of her life she has spent sleeping, Laurie Anderson’s new show, DELUSION, running at BAM’s Harvey Theater through October 3, consists of approximately twenty short mystery plays that move smoothly between the personal and the poltical, an intimate multimedia work about dreams and the state of the nation. Commissioned for the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, DELUSION features some of Anderson’s sharpest writing in years, performed in her unique talk-singing style either as herself or as deep-voiced alter ego Fenway Bergamot. Anderson glides between several microphones on a stage that includes video projections on a loveseat, shredded paper, a small scrim, and a large screen in back, depicting leaves flying in the wind, smoke drifting endlessly, a chalkboard filled with hard-to-decipher words and images, moonscapes, a child witnessing her mother’s death, and giant live shots of Anderson herself, playing her specially made violin. Joined by Colin Stetson on bass saxophone and Eyvind King on a more traditional violin, both men primarily seen in silhouette, Anderson, dressed in her trademark white shirt and thin black tie, tells jokes and stories about age, memory, Iceland, nineteenth-century Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, punctuation, and her own heritage. The centerpiece of the show is “Another Day in America,” from Anderson’s latest album, the just-released HOMELAND; “And so finally here we are, at the beginning of a whole new era, the start of a brand new world,” she sings as Bergamot. “And now what? How do we start? How do we begin again? . . . And so which way do we go?” Throughout the ninety-minute performance, Anderson, who has previously staged such pieces as THE END OF THE MOON, SONGS AND STORIES FROM MOBY DICK, EMPTY PLACES, and the seminal UNITED STATES: PARTS I-IV at BAM, is warmer and friendlier than ever, filled with charm and good humor, making strong eye contact with the audience as she delves into fascinating topics with a wink and a knowing smile.

NEW YORK GYPSY FESTIVAL

Drom and other venues
85 Ave. A
September 24 – October 3, free – $40
Festival Pass: $30
212-777-1156
www.nygypsyfest.com/2010

The sixth annual NY Gypsy Festival begins tonight with Selim Sesler and the NY Gypsy All-Stars at Drom. The ten-day celebration features performances by such individuals and groups as Mahala Rai Banda, the Veveritse Brass Band, Los Magnificos Impostores, Espiritu Gitano, Tecsoi, Stephane Wrembel, Zlatne Uste, Balval, and Yuri Yunakov, at Rumsey Playfield and Clipper City Tall Ship as well as at the home base, Drom. Past festivals have included such groups as Gogol Bordello, Beirut, Balkan Beat Box, Hazmat Modine, Slavic Soul Party! and Sway Machinery, so don’t be turned off if you don’t recognize any of the names in this year’s lineup just yet; next year everyone might know them, and tickets will be a lot harder to get.

TIBET IN SONG

Ngawang Choephel prepares a song with a friend for his moving, personal documentary (photo by David Huang)

TIBET IN SONG (Ngawang Choephel, 2009)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between Fifth Ave. & University Pl.
September 24 – October 1
212-924-3363
www.tibetinsong.com
www.cinemavillage.com

Ngawang Choephel wrote, directed, produced, narrates, and composed the score for the fascinating, intensely personal documentary TIBET IN SONG. Born in western Tibet in 1966, Ngawang set out in 1995 to capture the dying folk music of Tibet, a critical part of the country’s tradition and yet another aspect of their culture being buried by the Chinese takeover that had begun in 1959. Risking his life as well as his family’s — he also wanted to find the father he had not seen in decades — Ngawang, who grew up in a South Indian refugee camp, started to record Tibetan folk music to preserve its heritage, leading to his arrest on espionage charges. But he let nothing stop him, especially when he came upon Tibetans who were using native melodies to sing propaganda lyrics supplied by the Chinese government. But TIBET IN SONG, which has won awards at the Sundance Film Festival, the One World International Human Rights Film Festival, the Asian American International Film Festival, and others, is more than just one person’s private struggle; it is an important document about human rights, particularly when Ngawang speaks with Tibetan exiles in India who are not afraid to tell the truth.

NY CRAFT BEER WEEK

September 24 – October 3
Admission: free – $125 (most special events require advance RSVP)
www.nycbeerweek.com

The third annual event NY Craft Beer Week features nearly fifty breweries, including Allagash, Blue Point, Dogfish Head, Flying Dog, Jolly Pumpkin, Lagunitas, Magic Hat, Ommegang, Smuttynose, and Defiant, pouring their wares at such venues as Against the Grain, Amity Hall, Back Forty, Bar Twelve, Blue Smoke, d.b.a., Jimmy’s No. 43, Mel’s Burger Bar, Puck Fair, Stanton Public, Swift Hibernian Lounge, Tribeca Grill, Ulysses’ Folk House, and dozens of other bars and restaurants. Drinks begin flowing Friday night at the Rock Shop in Brooklyn, where the Freaktoberfest ($55, advance RSVP required) will include more than three dozen brews, burlesque performers, indie bands, and more. There will also be comedy shows, Monday Night Football gatherings, food pairings, happy hours, a trivia night, beer crawls, the Long Island City Craft Beer Festival, disc golf, a homebrewers tour, the Bike Brooklyn Beer Blitz, and the Staten Island Brewfest. The festival closes on October 3 with the Brewer’s Bash at Eleven Madison Park, with live music, a cask tasting with Garrett Oliver, and dinner prepared by executive chef Daniel Humm.

DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL

“Sushi” is performed in the windows of the BoConcept furniture store at 79 Front St. hourly between 2:00 & 5:00 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple locations
September 24-26
www.dumboartsfestival.com

The 2010 DUMBO Arts Festival will feature hundreds of events Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, three days of open studios, juried exhibitions and installations, concerts, dance, a digital summit, book signings, walking tours, performance art, a visual poetry marathon, children’s activities, and more, much of it free. The New York Photo Festival is premiering “Capture Brooklyn” at the powerHouse Arena, No Longer Empty will take over a suite in 111 Front St. as well as scaffolding outside 25 Washington St., Tom Verlaine will be playing at Galapagos with Billy Ficca and Patrick Derivaz, and Jonathan Lethem will be celebrating the launch of the paperback version of CHRONIC CITY. Among the other myriad participants and special events are the Brooklyn Ballet, Jane’s Carousel, storyteller LuAnn Adams, E. J. Antonio, the Strung Out String Band, Daniel Fishkin, Crystal Gregory, Mighty Tanaka, Bubby’s seventh annual Pie Social, a Steampunk Salon Saloon, and a bug-eating discussion with chef and artists Marc Dennis.

Anyone can be a star in Nelson Hancock’s two-part “That’s (not) Me” at DUMBO Arts Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

We particularly recommend Nelson Hancock’s “That’s (not) Me” outside on Main St. and inside at 55 Washington St., an August Sander-inspired project in which you can take a photograph of a friend or stranger, then switch places, then take a self-portrait, and you get to take home each photo of yourself; “Sushi,” in which Felisia Tandiono, Kashimi Asai, and Nung-Hsin Hu perform as three pieces of sushi in the windows of BoConcept at 79 Front St.; Andrea Cote and Michael Drisgula’s “Clay,” in which Cote will sculpt your head in clay while Drisgula documents it on video, with the same piece of clay used for all sitters; Fountain Art Fair favorite Allison Berkoy’s creepy projection “Asleep #3,” hidden away in a loading dock at 30 Washington St.; eteam’s “Gallery Cruise” at Smack Mellon on 92 Plymouth St., where you can relax at a table in the Tea Room, which offers a view of the Atlantic Ocean through a pair of windows; and Demetria Mazria’s “Take-Less” at 30 Washington St., composed of plastic take-out containers that form the number 2629, representing the number of such containers used (and then thrown out) every second in the United States. (We were looking forward to Janet Biggs’s “Wet Exit,” but it was canceled at the last minute.)