twi-ny recommended events

DOC NYC: BUNKER 77

The wild life and times of Bunker Spreckels is explored in new documentary

The wild life and times of sugar scion Bunker Spreckels is explored in new documentary

BUNKER77 (Takuji Masuda, 2016)
Wednesday, November 16, IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 2:45
Thursday, November 17, Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West Twenty-Third St. at Eighth Ave., 7:45
www.docnyc.net
bunker77film.com

Former Japanese national surfing champion Takuji Masuda documents the wild life and times of sugar scion Bunker Spreckels in the bumpy, oddly titled Bunker77, which is having its New York City premiere November 16 and 17 at the DOC NYC festival. Born in Los Angeles in 1949, Spreckels is described in the film by friends and relatives as “radical,” “original,” “unique,” “dangerous,” and “fun,” a blond beach bum and party lover who rode waves around the world with his specially made short boards. “That was his international persona: the hunter, the surfer, the playboy, the jet-setter, the martial artist, all in one,” skateboard legend Tony Alva says of his friend and mentor. Spreckels’s grandfather, Adolph B. Spreckels, ran the Spreckels Sugar Company and, with his wife, Alma, helped develop the cities of San Francisco and San Diego. After Spreckels’s parents, Adolph B. Spreckels II and former actress Kay Williams, divorced, his mother married Clark Gable, who helped raise Bunker and his sister, Joan, for five years. Bunker always did things his own way, but his life spiraled out of control once he turned twenty-one and gained access to his multimillion-dollar trust fund, caught up in a storm of drugs, alcohol and women. He tried to become a rock star and a screen idol while skateboarding and surfing in California, Hawai’i, Australia, and South Africa. His story is told by such surfing legends as Laird Hamilton, Vinny Bryan, Bill Hamilton, Rory Russell, Nat Young, Herbie Fletcher, Spyder Wills, and Wayne Bartholomew; childhood friends Curtis Allen (son of cowboy movie star Rex Allen) and Ira Opper; Surfer magazine photographer Art Brewer, associate editor Kurt Ledterman, chief editor Drew Kampion, and publisher Steve Pezman; longtime girlfriend Ellie Silva; and journalist C. R. Steyck III, whose extensive interview with Spreckels near the end of his life is sprinkled throughout the documentary. Masuda also includes home movies, photographs, relevant clips from Gable films, and scenes from 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, in which Johnny Knoxville plays Topper Burks, who is based on Spreckels, and 1961’s Blue Hawaii, in which Elvis Presley plays a character eerily similar to Bunker. “You can definitely have too much fun with too much money,” Bartholomew says, while Steyck adds, “He was a dangerous man, mainly dangerous to himself.”

Bunker Spreckels struts his stuff in Takuji Masuda’s BUNKER77

In the works since 2008, Bunker77 features terrific footage, but it’s also scattershot and often confusing, especially when it comes to Bunker’s real name, his desire to be in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, and the making of his own hallucinogenic epic, End of Summer. Writer, director, and producer Masuda gets some big-time power behind him — the executive producers of the film are Oscar-nominated actor Ed Norton, Red Hot Chili Peppers leader Anthony Kiedis, Sundance programmer Trevor Groth, and Emmy and Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan, while the coproducers are Joan Spreckels, Brewer, Steyck, and John Gable, the son of Kay and Clark — but the film feels rather thrown together. The different elements don’t form a cohesive visual whole, loosely constructed from too many disparate sources. (There’s even brief animation.) In fact, although surf photographer Dave Homcy is credited as cinematographer, there is additional cinematography by eleven others, and six editors are listed in the credits. Still, there is plenty of awesome surfing footage, and the story of Spreckels’s rise and fall is bizarrely fascinating. Bunker77 is screening November 16 at 2:45 at IFC Center and November 17 at 7:45 at Cinépolis Chelsea, with Masuda on hand to discuss the film.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL — THANK YOU FOR COMING: PLAY

Faye Driscoll makes her BAM debut with THANK YOU FOR COMING: PLAY (photo by Maria Baranova)

FAYE DRISCOLL
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
November 16-19, $25, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
fayedriscoll.com

On July 30, we were on Governors Island, checking out a work-in-progress LMCC Open Studios presentation of Brooklyn-based choreographer Faye Driscoll’s latest evening-length piece, Thank You for Coming: Play. Like its dazzling predecessor, Thank You for Coming: Attendance, which had its New York premiere at Danspace Project in March 2014, it is a participatory, immersive work. In Attendance, people were invited to join in a swirling, exhilarating finale. At the advance look at Play on Governors Island, the audience again was involved, but we don’t want to spoil the surprise about how the interaction influenced dancers Paul Singh, Laurel Snyder, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, and Brandon Washington. It all made for a charmingly controlled chaos; it will be fascinating to see how the piece, which had its world premiere in September at the Wexner Center at Ohio State University, has evolved, as Driscoll also took detailed notes at a wide-ranging postperformance discussion in which attendees were not shy about sharing their thoughts, which is exactly what Driscoll wanted. As she writes on her website, “I make dances that are mistaken for plays and load-in like installations. Sets are designed to break apart, musical scores are made from performers’ stomps and voices, props are worn, used, and reused for fantasy, excess, and loss. Performers sing, fight, frolic, and make love in bursts, like rapid fire flip-books of human emotion. Awkward virtuosic bodies teeter on the edge of high art and slapstick. A viewer feels a rollercoaster of joy, outrage, arousal, and discomfort while performers hold a frank gaze that says, ‘You are me and I am you.’ Embarrassment and exhilaration live side by side. I aim for an immersive world of sensorial complexity and perceptual disorientation. Through performers’ powerful exposure, heightened proximity, and at times physical connection with the audience, viewers feel their own culpability as co-creators of the performance. My work is a rigorously crafted group experience that comes off as improvised, chaotic and spontaneous.” The second part of a trilogy, Thank You for Coming: Play is running November 16-19 at the BAM Fisher; in addition, Driscoll, the recipient of the Harkness Dance Residency at the BAM Fisher, will be teaching a class, open to performers at all levels, on November 18 at 2:00 ($30) at the Mark Morris Dance Center across the street.

THE DEATH OF THE LAST BLACK MAN IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD AKA THE NEGRO BOOK OF THE DEAD

Who gived birth tuh this. I wonder,” Black Man with Watermelon (Daniel J. Watts) says in searing Suzan-Lori Parks play at the Signature (photo © 2016 Joan Marcus)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18, $30 through December 4, $35-$65 after
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

As the audience enters the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre to see the Signature revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World AKA the Negro Book of the Dead, a man in overalls is onstage, sitting in a chair, his bare feet on the gravel, arms dangling at his side, his head, face covered by a hat, slumped over, as if dead. Behind him is a long, diagonal tree branch and an electric chair on a cantilevered porch. Most of the people who filter in take a quick look at the stage before continuing ongoing conversations, paging through the Playbill, or checking their cell phones. Meanwhile, the dead man just sits there, mostly unnoticed, the lengthy title of the play projected in large block letters on the back wall. It’s an apt metaphor for the show itself, first presented in 1990 at BACA Downtown in Brooklyn and now extremely relevant again amid the Black Lives Matter movement and the shooting of so many unarmed black men, women, and children by police. The searing eighty-minute production begins with an overture in which nine spirit characters, each representing a different African American archetype/stereotype, slowly enter Riccardo Hernandez’s set, carrying a watermelon with them. During the overture, they introduce themselves by speaking their signature lines, which also serve as their names: Lots of Grease and Lots of Pork (Jamar Williams), Queen-Then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut (Amelia Workman), And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger (Reynaldo Piniella), Prunes and Prisms (Mirirai Sithole), Ham (Patrena Murray), Voice on Thuh Tee V (William DeMeritt), Old Man River Jordan (Julian Rozzell), Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread (Nike Kadri), and Before Columbus (David Ryan Smith). Then Black Woman with Fried Drumstick (Roslyn Ruff) sits in the rocking chair next to the dead man, Black Man with Watermelon (Daniel J. Watts), and says, “Yesterday today next summer tomorrow just uh moment uhgoh in 1317 dieded thuh last black man in thuh whole entire world. Uh! Oh. Dont be uhlarmed. Do not be afeared. It was painless. Uh painless passin. . . . Why dieded he huh? Where he gonna go now that he done dieded? Where he gonna go tuh wash his hands?” Moving around Riccardo Hernandez’s set in highly stylized motion choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly and in representative costumes by Montana Blanco, the characters talk in a poetic and rhythmic language about the world being flat, the “saint mines,” the civil rights movement, dragons, and freedom over the course of four acts called panels — “Thuh Holy Ghost,” “First Chorus,” “Thuh Lonesome 3Some,” and “Second Chorus” — that unfold in a nonlinear and repetitive manner. “The black man bursts into flames. The black man bursts into blames. Whose fault is it?” asks Black Man with Watermelon, who dies over and over again. “Figuring out the truth put them in their place and they scurried out to put us in ours,” Before Columbus says.

Pulitzer Prize winner Parks (Topdog/Underdog, Father Comes Home from the Wars [Parts 1, 2 & 3]) sets the play “here,” in “the present,” and it’s frightening how that could fit from the discovery of America to today and beyond, particularly given the current state of the country, so mired in systemic racism. When Black Man with Watermelon says, again and again, “Cant breathe,” and gasps, it is impossible not to think of Eric Garner, but those lines were written more than twenty-five years ago. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz (War, Red Speedo) maintains a mesmerizing rhythmic flow to the abstract narrative, which was inspired by the Stations of the Cross and free jazz. The cast is outstanding, portraying stock characters who are far more complex than mere stereotypes and reach deep into black history. For example, And Bigger and Bigger and Bigger is an expansion of Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s Native Son, Queen-Then-Pharaoh Hatshepsut is based on the second Egyptian female pharaoh, and Ham is a conglomeration of the son of Noah and the old minstrel song “Hambone, Hambone, Have You Heard?” Front and center are Watts (Hamilton, The Color Purple) and August Wilson veteran Ruff (Fences, Familiar), who embody the desperation blacks have suffered for centuries. Yes and Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread demands, “You should write it down because if you dont write it down then they will come along and tell the future that we did not exist. You should write it down and you should hide it under a rock. You should write down the past and you should write down the present and in what in the future you should write it down.” And that’s precisely what Parks has done although, unfortunately, it appears to be a story with no end. (Blanco will discuss her costume design before the November 16 performance, the shows on November 17, 22, and 29 will be followed by a talkback with members of the cast and creative team, and there will be a cocktail hour before the December 1 show. Parks’s Signature residency continues in April 2017 with Venus followed by The Red Letter Plays: In the Blood and Fucking A in the 2017-18 season.)

DIANE ARBUS: IN THE BEGINNING

Diane Arbus, Lady on a bus, N.Y.C., gelatin silver print, 1957 (© The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved)

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 27, suggested admission $12-$25
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

The Met Breuer doesn’t just invite visitors into the early work of photographer Diane Arbus in the sensational show “diane arbus: in the beginning.” It ingeniously immerses them in the world that so attracted the New York City artist in her formative years, allowing museumgoers to make their own path through the people she encountered. “We’re looking at 1956 to 1962, made primarily in New York City, from Times Square to Coney Island to the Lower East Side, the same terrain that so many other artists of the era covered, offer[ing] this artist a new way of understanding who we are and who we might be. You feel the authentic quality of each of the individuals,” curator Jeff Rosenheim says in a Met Breuer video. “She seems to be able to separate the individual from the society. That is the power of a great Diane Arbus picture, that incessant need to know, and to record, and to follow her own eyes to wherever it took her, is defining of her career.” Consisting of more than one hundred works, most of which have never been shown publicly before and were printed by Arbus herself, the exhibition features photographs mounted on two sides of large rectangular stanchions arranged in rows in the gallery, allowing people to weave in and around Arbus’s fascinating landscape. Born in 1923 in New York City, Arbus got her first camera from her husband in 1941. (She was married for twenty-eight years to actor and photographer Allan Arbus, best known for playing psychiatrist Sidney Freedman on the M*A*S*H television series.) By the mid-to-late fifties, Arbus was documenting a wide variety of men, women, and children primarily in New York City as well as sideshow performers in Palisades Park, strippers in Atlantic City, and female impersonators on Long Island. One of her favorite haunts was Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, where she photographed freaks, but none of her pictures were exploitative.

“I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photograph them,” she said. She also noted, “For me the subject of the picture is always more important that the picture. And more complicated.” Most of her subjects were well aware they were being photographed and posed for the camera, although some were caught unaware. In “Miss Stormé de Larverie, the Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman, N.Y.C. 1961,” an elegant trans person, cigarette in hand, sits confidently on a park bench. In “Miss Makrina, a Russian Midget, in her kitchen, N.Y.C. 1959,” a small woman pauses while cleaning. In “Kid in a hooded jacket aiming a gun, N.Y.C. 1957,” a child in a winter coat points a gun at the camera. In “Seated female impersonator with arm crossed on her bare chest, N.Y.C. 1960,” the subject is topless, his anatomy clashing with his makeup and hairstyle. And in “A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970,” a man hunches over, towering above his parents in their living room. There are also photos of a tattooed man, the Human Pincushion, scenes from movies, a family relaxing on their expansive lawn, a trapeze act, and an old lady in a hospital bed nearing her last breath. In the early 1960s, Arbus would switch to a 2¼-inch square-format Rolleiflex camera, continuing to capture a different side of America, but “in the beginning” wonderfully reveals where it all started. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” Arbus, who committed suicide in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, famously said. The same can be said for this must-experience exhibit.

NEA JAZZ MASTERS SUMMIT CONCERT

Five NEA Jazz Masters will join forces for an all-star show at Flushing Town Hall

Five NEA Jazz Masters will join forces for all-star show at Flushing Town Hall

Who: Jimmy Heath, Barry Harris, Jimmy Owens, George Coleman, Jimmy Cobb, David Wong
What: Historic all-star jazz concert
Where: Flushing Town Hall, 137-35 Northern Blvd., 718-463-7700 x222
When: Friday, November 18, $20-$42 (standing room $20), 8:00
Why: Since 1982, more than 150 musicians have been named Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, honoring “living legends who have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of jazz.” On November 18, five such living legends will perform together at Flushing Town Hall: saxophonists Jimmy Heath (inducted 2003) and George Coleman (2015), pianist Barry Harris (1989), trumpeter Jimmy Owens (2012), and drummer Jimmy Cobb (2009), joined by bassist David Wong. It’s quite a lineup, and although all the seats are sold out, standing room tickets are still available, at a mere twenty bucks, to catch this very special show.

JEWISH COMIC CON

jewish-comic-con

Congregation Kol Israel
603 St. Johns Pl. at Franklin Ave.
Sunday, November 13, Bagel one-day pass $15, 9:00 am – 6:30 pm, Challah preview pass (includes Saturday night), $20
jewishcomiccon.org

Many of the greatest comic book artists are Jewish, so it was only a matter of time before someone started Jewish Comic Con, making its debut Sunday, November 13, preceded by a preview night November 12 (with a live auction and a dramatic reading by Jeff Newelt aka JahFurry of work by Harvey Pekar). The con announces that it is “celebrating our comic book legacy,” and what a legacy it is. Started by Fred Polaniecki and Fabrice Sapolsky, the event takes place in Congregation Kol Israel, the oldest continuously running Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn. All proceeds will go to restoring and preserving the historic landmark, which was built in 1924. Among the guests are Dean Haspiel, Josh Neufeld, Danny Fingeroth, Ariel Schrag, Arie Kaplan, Gareb Shamus, Joshua H. Stulman, Jordan Gorfinkel, and Will Torres. Advance passes are sold out, but limited tickets will be available at the door on a first-come, first-served basis. There will be kosher food for purchase, and, since this is a working shul, the morning service will be held at 8:00 and the afternoon service at 4:00. Although you are encouraged to come in costume, it is a synagogue, so the organizers ask that you be respectful and tone down the sex and violence. Below are the special programs.

Heroes & Faith, with Darren Vincenzo, Rabbi Cary Friedman, and others, moderated by Jordan Gorfinkel, 9:00 am

Eisner, Kirby, Siegel, Etc.: The Jewish Roots of Comics, with Julian Voloj and others, moderated by Arie Kaplan and/or Danny Fingeroth, 10:00

Spotlight on Mort Gerberg, with Mort Gerberg, moderated by Danny Fingeroth, 11:00 am

Breaking into Comics the Chutzpah Way!, with Danny Fingeroth, Dean Haspiel, and Fabrice Sapolsky, moderated by Arie Kaplan, 12 noon

The Mezuzah on the Batcave Door: Jewish Elements of Batman, with Jordan Gorfinkel and Sholly Fisch, moderated by Arie Kaplan and/or Danny Fingeroth, 1:30

Indie Voices: Past, Present & Future, with Ariel Schrag, Dean Haspiel, and Josh Neufeld, moderated by Arie Kaplan and/or Danny Fingeroth, 2:30

Jewish Heroes & Villains, with Greg Pak and Fabrice Sapolsky, moderated by Arie Kaplan and/or Danny Fingeroth, 4:30

Cartoonists Against the Holocaust, with Craig Yoe and Rafael Medoff, illustrated panel discussion and Q&A, 5:30

3-D AUTEURS: GRAVITY

Space debris from a Russian satellite threatens an American shuttle crew in GRAVITY

GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, November 12, 9:20, Monday, November 14, 5:30,
Thursday, November 17, 12:30, Friday, November 25, 2:30
Series runs November 11-29
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
gravitymovie.warnerbros.com

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a breathtaking thriller that instantly enters the pantheon of such classic space fare as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and The Right Stuff. And if you haven’t seen it in 3-D, how it’s being shown in the Film Forum series “3-D Auteurs” this month, well, you haven’t really seen it. While medical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is fixing a computer glitch outside the shuttle Explorer, veteran astronaut and wisecracker Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), on his final mission before retirement, is playing around with a new jetpack and Shariff (voiced by Paul Sharma) is having fun going on a brief spacewalk. But disaster strikes when debris from a destroyed Russian satellite suddenly comes their way, killing Shariff and the rest of the crew and crippling the shuttle, leaving Stone and Kowalski on their own in deep space, their communication with Mission Control in Houston (voiced by Ed Harris, in a nod to his participation in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff) gone as well. Kowalski is cool and calm, listening to country music as he tries to come up with a plan that will get them to the International Space Station, but the inexperienced Stone is running out of oxygen fast as she tumbles through the emptiness, Earth in the background, so close yet so far. Written by Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También, Children of Men) with his son Jonás, Gravity is spectacularly photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki, the master behind numerous works by Cuarón and Terrence Malick (The New World, The Tree of Life), among others. Lubezki and his team even created a new LED light box to increase the film’s realism, which is nothing less than awe-inspiring and mind-bending as it takes place in real time. Despite the vastness of space, Gravity often feels claustrophobic, particularly as Stone struggles to get a breath or attempts to operate a foreign module.

Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) try to remain together in Alfonso Cuarón’s masterful space epic

Close-ups of Stone and Kowalski reveal reflections of the shuttle and Earth, emphasizing the astronauts’ dire situation as they engage in a very different kind of pas de deux. Gravity also succeeds where directors like James Cameron often fail, as a solid, relatively unsentimental and unpredictable script accompanies the remarkable visuals, which evoke both harrowing underwater adventures as well as dangerous mountain-climbing journeys. (Cuarón also manages to bring it all in in a terrifically paced ninety minutes.) Cuarón and Lubezki favor long takes, including an opening shot lasting more than thirteen minutes, immersing the viewer in the film, further enhanced by being projected in 3-D and IMAX 3-D, which is not used as merely a gimmick here. Stephen Price’s score increases the tension as well until getting melodramatic near the end. Clooney is ever dapper and charming and Bullock is appropriately nervous and fearful in their first screen pairing, even though they only make contact with each other through bulky spacesuits, their connection primarily via speaking. Cuarón, who also edited Gravity with Mark Sanger, has made an endlessly exciting film for the ages, a technological marvel that should continue to have a tremendous impact on the future of the industry. Winner of seven Academy Awards including Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects, Gravity is screening November 12, 14, 17, and 25 in “3-D Auteurs,” which runs November 11-29 at Film Forum and consists of approximately three dozen 3-D feature films and shorts, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Takashi Miike’s Hara Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, Three Stooges and Méliès shorts, and the wacky double feature of Johnnie To’s Office and George Sidney’s Kiss Me Kate.