twi-ny recommended events

STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH DAY WITH KEN JACOBS

There will be no cheek-pinching of Ken Jacobs at special day celebrating his avant-garde classic STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH

Union Docs
322 Union Ave.
Saturday, September 18, 1:30
Suggested donation: $12
www.uniondocs.org
www.starspangledtodeath.com

Union Docs, in conjunction with Electronic Arts Intermix, will honor legendary filmmaker and artist Ken Jacobs with a full day of festive events on Saturday, September 18, built around the Brooklyn native’s magnum opus, the no-budget STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, which was begun in the 1950s and completed in 2004. Jacobs describes the four-hundred-minute work as “an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! [C]ombining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Racial and religious insanity, monopolization of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war oppose a Beat playfulness.” The cast includes Jacobs, Jack Smith as the Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and Jerry Sims as Suffering. The day will feature a screening of the film, a Star Spangled Supper, a Jacobs-led tour of East Village locations used in the film, and a discussion with J. Hoberman and Jacobs at around 10:00. This is a spectacular program that lovers of independent, avant-garde film and the city itself should not miss.

SUPERCHUNK

Superchunk is back in town for a pair of sold-out shows (photo by Christian Lantry)

Saturday, September 18, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St., $22, 9:00
Sunday, September 19, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth St., $22, 9:00
www.myspace.com/superchunkmusic

We don’t know what we were thinking when we opted not to check out Superchunk’s free concert this past July at the South Street Seaport, but we were majorly bummed when we heard afterward that they put on a great show, bouncing around onstage like a bunch of kids and blowing the crowd away. Well, we’re happy to say that the Chapel Hill band is back for two area gigs this weekend, and although they’re not free, it’s hard to pass up another chance to see one of the most legendary alternative bands still out on the road. (The shows are sold out, but maybe you can search online or beg friends with tickets to let you go with them.) Singer-guitarist Mac McCaughan, bassist Laura Ballance, guitarist Jim Wilbur, and drummer Jon Wurster are touring behind MAJESTY SHREDDING, their first new LP since 2001’s HERE’S TO SHUTTING UP. While the quartet breaks no new ground on the album, which came out Tuesday on Merge Records, the label cofounded by McCaughan and Ballance back in 1989, it’s great to hear McCaughan’s lilting vocals and Wilbur’s alternately searing and crunching guitar sounds pounding out such fresh-sounding new tunes as “Digging for Something,” “My Gap Feels Weird,” and “Crossed Wires.” Superchunk, who has been featuring such older songs as “Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama),” “Driveway to Driveway,” “Slack Motherfucker,” and “Hyper Enough” at recent shows, will be at the Bowery Ballroom on Saturday night with Let’s Wrestle and at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday night with Wild Nothing and Todd Barry.

PUBLIC ART FUND TALKS: RYAN GANDER

Ryan Gander’s “The Happy Prince” will tantalize passersby through April 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The New School, Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th St. between University Pl. & Sixth Ave.
Thursday, September 16, $10, 6:30
212-223-7805
www.publicartfund.org
“the happy prince” opening slideshow

In describing British artist Ryan Gander and his “Passengers: 1.3” 2007 exhibit at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, CCA director Jens Hoffman wrote, “Gander’s works are uncommonly hard to decipher. He sends us on a journey that is less about trying to arrive at an intellectual understanding and more about engaging in a form of detective work, which is often linked to the history of larger social structures and their relationships to the human condition. He lays out the evidence and asks us to study it carefully, connecting the different elements and forming our own personal relationship with them.” Hoffman’s perfect summation can also be applied to Gander’s latest piece, his first commissioned public sculpture, “The Happy Prince,” which went on view yesterday at Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the beginning of Central Park on 60th St. & Fifth Ave.

Ryan Gander will be giving one of his “Loose Associations” PowerPoint performance-lectures at the New School on September 16 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Using glass-reinforced concrete, Gander has brought to life the end of Oscar Wilde’s 1888 absurdist fairy tale about a gilded statue of the Happy Prince, which goes from being “as beautiful as a weathercock” to “little better than a beggar” after a severe frost. Ever the visual storyteller, Gander incorporates many elements of the tale into his sculpture, including the Swallow, the prince’s crown, and his heart, all of which can be found within the rubble with some detective work. The sculpture not only comments on public art and monuments but also relates to Central Park and New York itself, a proud city that has more than its fair share of princes and beggars. Gander, whose “Intervals” site-specific installation opens at the Guggenheim on October 1, will be presenting one of his famed “Loose Associations” illustrated performance-lectures at the New School on September 16 as part of the Public Art Fund Talks series, in which he combines text and images in unique ways via PowerPoint.

INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER CONFERENCE

Director Debra Granik (WINTER’S BONE) is one of the many special guests participating in the IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Conference

Haft Auditorium, FIT
227 West 27th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
September 19-23
Tickets: $35-$300
www.ifp.org

The IFP, which is dedicated to independent film and its ability to “expand people’s points of view by exposing them to different ones,” is holding its annual Independent Filmmaker Conference from September 19 to 23 at FIT’s Haft Auditorium. Daily discussions will focus on “The Future of Film” (Sunday), “Do or DIY: Distribution and Marketing” (Monday), “The Truth About Non-Fiction” (Tuesday), “The Reel World: Doc and Fiction Collide” (Wednesday), and “Sustaining a Film (and Media) Making Career” (Thursday), with six panels each day, featuring directors, producers, marketers, bloggers, composers, festival curators, film critics, online experts, and other industry insiders and outsiders. There will also be several “case studies,” taking special looks at Debra Granik’s WINTER’S BONE, Jay Duplass’s CYRUS, Lena Dunham’s TINY FURNITURE, and Tim Hetherington’s RESTREPO, as well as conversations with HBO’s Sheila Nevins, Power to the Pixel’s Liz Rosenthal, and AMERICAN SPLENDOR’s Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. The event is open to the public; ticket prices begin at $35 for individual sessions, with festival passes for nonmembers running $300.

ICONS: BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN

Eisenstein classic is part of Icons film series at the Rubin Museum

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)
Cabaret Cinema
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, September 17, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org/cabaretcinema

Sergei M. Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN might be a seminal silent classic that changed the nature of filmmaking, but it is also still a vastly entertaining movie regardless of its cinematic influence and worldwide importance. Divided into five episodes — Men and Maggots, Drama at the Harbour, A Dead Man Calls for Justice, The Odessa Staircase, and The Rendez-vous with a Squadron — the film tells the based-on-fact story of a mutiny on board a sailing vessel, the result of unfair treatment of the workers, a microcosm of the Russian Revolution of 1905 that later led to the bigger revolution of 1917. The film is like an editing primer, its approach to montage causing its own revolution at the time, particularly during the unforgettable Odessa Steps sequence, in which Eisenstein’s cuts manipulate the action in powerful, emotional ways that were new to cinema. The film also features the best mustaches in the history of movies. BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN is available in numerous versions with slightly different intertitles and soundtracks; although we’re not sure which one will be shown at the Rubin Museum on September 17 (introduced by Russian writer Alex Galper) as part of its latest K2 Friday night CabaretCinema series, Icons, you can rest assured that it will be a thrilling experience, especially if you’ve never seen the film before.

OF MONTREAL

Of Montreal isn’t afraid to get a little goofy on record or at their live shows

Terminal 5
610 West 56th St.
Friday, September 17, and Saturday, September 18, $27.50-$30, 8:00
www.myspace.com/ofmontreal
www.terminal5nyc.com

Don’t let the funky grooves flying all over Of Montreal’s tenth album, FALSE PRIEST (Polyvinyl, September 14), fool you; band founder and Apollinaire Rave artistic director Kevin Barnes is still delving deep into suicide, shattered hearts, self-brutality, death anxiety, and loneliness — as well as particle wave duality, auto-da-fés, fetishized archetypes, uncalibrated skulls, frontal lobe regression, and Chinese urine. The Athens, Georgia, group, which has been shuffled and reshuffled over its thirteen-year career, with more former members than current members (and some albums recorded primarily by Barnes alone), has a ball on the new disc, mixing in falsetto funk, rollicking R&B, heavenly dance pop, and Euro-disco that has the sonic glee of Gnarls Barkley — perhaps it is no coincidence that OM has covered GB’s “Crazy.” On FALSE PRIEST, Of Montreal channels a little Beatles here (“You Do Mutilate?”), a whole lot of Prince there (“Like a Tourist,” “Sex Karma”), and even a bit of Bowie to boot (“Godly Intersex”). Janelle Monáe of the Wondaland Arts Society adds groovy raps to “Our Riotous Defects” and “Enemy Gene,” while Solange Knowles gets hot and heavy with Barnes on “Sex Karma,” which features the killer rhyme “You took me centuries to master / In the next life I will have to learn you faster.” Barnes and company — Bryan Poole, Davey Pierce, Dottie Alexander, Clayton Rychlik, Thayer Sarrano, Nicolas Dobbratz, and K Ishibashi — will be headlining Terminal 5 this Friday and Saturday with Kansas native Monáe, who recently released her debut album, THE ARCHANDROID (SUITES II AND III) (Bad Boy, May 18, 2010).

SHOP WITH A JOCK: AMAR’E STOUDEMIRE

Amar’e Stoudemire will stop by the NBA Store on September 15 for a little shopping and an autograph session

NBA Store
666 Fifth Ave. at 52nd St.
Wednesday, September 15, $20 purchase required for autograph, 5:00 – 6:00
212-515-6221
www.nba.com/nycstore
www.amarestoudemire.com

Five-time All-Star and newest New York Knickerbocker Amar’e Stoudemire will do a little preseason shopping on September 15, taking three young kids on a buying spree at the NBA Store in Midtown at 5:00 (two of whom were chosen through the Garden of Dreams foundation, the third through his Facebook page). In addition, the Lake Wales, Florida, native, who spent his first eight years with the Phoenix Suns, compiling a career average of 21.4 ppg and 8.9 rpg, will be signing autographs for fans who spend at least twenty bucks at the store. Will the 2003 Rookie of the Year have much of an impact on the 2010-11 Knicks? Well, it’s highly unlikely he will make things any worse.