twi-ny recommended events

BIG APPLE BARBECUE BLOCK PARTY 2016

There’s plenty of smokin’ good ’cue at annual BBQ block party in Madison Square Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Madison Square Park
23rd to 26th Sts. between Fifth & Madison Aves.
Saturday, June 11, and Sunday, June 12, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: free; $10 per plate of barbecue
Fast Pass: $131.72; Big Wig VIP Package: $288.53
www.bigapplebbq.org
www.madisonsquarepark.org

The immensely popular and ridiculously crowded Big Apple Barbecue Block Party is upon us, as pitmasters from around the country gather in Madison Square Park and serve up some damn fine BBQ. The fourteenth annual event, being held June 11-12, features some old favorites as well as some up-and-comers: Mike Mills and Amy Mills of the 17th Street Bar & Grill from Murphysboro, Illinois; Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q from Decatur, Alabama; Patrick Martin of Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint from Nashville, Tennessee; Garry Roark and Leslie Roark Scott of Ubon’s Barbeque from Yazoo City, Mississippi; Scott Roberts of the Salt Lick BBQ from Driftwood, Texas; John Wheeler of Memphis Barbecue Co. from Horn Lake, Mississippi; Sam Jones of Sam Jones Wood-Fired N.C. Whole Hog BBQ from Winterville, North Carolina; Joe Duncan of Baker’s Ribs from Dallas, Texas; Ed Mitchell and Ryan Mitchell from Wilson, North Carolina; and local purveyors Jean-Paul Bourgeois of Blue Smoke, Charles Grund Jr. of Hill Country, John Stage of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, and Billy Durney of Hometown BBQ. The lines can get extremely long, so the best way to enjoy the event is to go with a bunch of friends, get on different lines, and then gather somewhere in the park to devour your meal (while also checking out Martin Puryear’s new installation, “Big Bling”). Each plate of ’cue will run you ten bucks. The FastPass is back, where for $131.72 you get access for you and one guest to the express lanes and $100 worth of food, drink, and merchandise; the Big Wig VIP Package grants you that in addition to access to the VIP tent and private VIP area with open bar and snacks, for $288.53. Saturday’s music lineup consists of the Demolition String Band at 2:30 and Bernie Williams & His All-Star Band at 4:00, while Sunday’s roster is Josiah & the Bonnevilles at 2:30 and David Ryan Harris at 4:00.

MUNCH AND EXPRESSIONISM

Edvard Munch, “Puberty,” oil on canvas, 1914-16 (the Munch Museum, Oslo)

Neue Galerie
1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th St.
Through June 13 (closed Tuesday & Wednesday)
212-628-6200
www.neuegalerie.org

In 2007, Neue Galerie New York presented “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” which examined the influence Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh had on German and Austrian Expressionism. Now the curator of that exhibit, Dr. Jill Lloyd, has teamed up with Dr. Reinhold Heller for a fascinating follow-up, “Munch and Expressionism,” creating a compelling back-and-forth dialogue between works by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) with such German artists as Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gabriele Münter, and Emile Nolde and such Austrian artists as Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. “The radical qualities of Edvard Munch’s work — his extreme originality and inventiveness — have frequently led to him being linked to the art of the future,” Dr. Lloyd writes in her catalog essay “Edvard Munch and the Expressionists: Influence and Affinity.” She adds, “But whereas van Gogh . . . is justly deemed a precursor or ‘father’ of Expressionism, Munch, by contrast, both inspired and participated in the movement.” The splendidly curated exhibition groups a pair of Munch self-portraits, 1906’s “Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine” and 1923-24’s “The Night Wanderer,” with Beckmann’s 1938 “Self-Portrait with Horn” and Gerstl’s 1907 “Self-Portrait in Front of a Stove,” as if the men have come together for a chat. Munch landscapes “Winter, Elgersburg” and “White Night” feel right at home with Münter’s “The Blue Gable” and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s “Footpath,” in both color and abstraction. Munch’s glorious “Puberty,” seen in both an 1894 drawing and an exciting 1914-16 oil painting, takes on added meaning alongside Heckel’s “Standing Child”; the apparent communication continues through Heckel’s “Bathers in a Pond” and a quartet of bathing paintings by Munch, including the bold, extraordinary “Standing Nude Against Blue Background.”

Edvard Munch, “The Artist and His Model,” oil on canvas, 1919-21 (the Munch Museum, Oslo)

A small room is dedicated to Munch’s most iconic work, “The Scream,” with its spectacular color palette and powerful emotion. The 1895 favorite is joined by several print editions as well as a trio of self-portraits by Schiele and Heckel’s woodcut “Man in the Forest.” Other standout groupings include Munch’s “Mountain Road” with Kirchner’s “Women on Potsdamer Platz,” Munch’s “The Book Family” with Kirchner’s “Street, Dresden, 1908,” and Munch’s “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” with Schiele’s “Man and Woman I (Lovers I).” An exploration of Munch’s printmaking methods is another aspect of this show, with multiple woodcuts of “Towards the Forest II,” “Angst,” “The Kiss,” “Evening. Melancholy,” “Old Fisherman,” and “Madonna,” echoed by Nolde’s “Young Danish Woman,” Hermann Max Pechstein’s “Lovers,” and Kirchner’s “Head of a Sick Man.” However, the dialogue occurred only in their art and not in person. “There is plenty of evidence that the Brücke artists sought out Munch, inviting him, for example, to send work to their group exhibitions in 1906, 1908, and 1909, although Munch carefully sidestepped these overtures,” Dr. Lloyd notes in her essay. “Nolde and the Brücke artists apparently confronted a brick wall when they tried to enlist Munch to their cause, despite his stated admiration for their work.” Even if these artists from Norway, Germany, and Austria never broke bread together or sat down and discussed art, this exhibit creates quite an intriguing visual conversation between them.

PERFORMANCE MIX FESTIVAL 2016

Michael Helland kicks off the thirtieth Performance Mix Festival with (photo by David Gonsier)

Michael Helland kicks off the thirtieth Performance Mix Festival with RECESS: DANCE OF LIGHT (photo by David Gonsier)

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
June 6-11, free – $20
212-598-0400
newdancealliance.org
www.abronsartscenter.org

The thirtieth Performance Mix Festival returns to its original home this week, presenting more than three dozen emerging and midcareer dance artists and companies in fifteen events at the Abrons Arts Center, celebrating the past while looking toward the future. Focusing on experimental, multidisciplinary works, the festival has also been held at such locations as Dixon Place, the Joyce SoHo, HERE, and Dance Theater Workshop. The 2016 edition of PMF opens June 6 with Michael Helland’s site responsive one-man live-sculpture show RECESS: Dance of Light, which promises to “recharge your batteries and combat the symptoms of neoliberal fatigue.” On June 7, “Path Breakers Create Ever-Evolving Worlds of Performance” consists of Michael Freeman’s It’s not that I have anything against living…, Headlong and the Riot Group’s Magic Wand, an excerpt from James & Jen | McGinn & Again’s a Gram & a Gone, and Johanna S. Meyer’s work in progress Handbuilt. On June 8, the free “Edgy NYC” brings together feminist performance and video by Susana Cook, Jess Dobkin, Rebecca Patek and T. L. Cowan & Jasmine Rault as Mrs. Trixie Cane & Her Handsome Cellist, and festival founder and director Karen Bernard. On June 9, “Typography, Images, Landscape, Heightened Drama” pairs Jil Guyon’s Desert Widow with GREYZONE’s Drift. On June 10, “Three Artists…Three Fantastical/Fanciful Perspectives on Performance” comprises Melinda Ring and Renée Archibald’s Renée vs the Rectangle, Paula Josa-Jones | Performance Works’ Speak, and Patti Bradshaw and Valerie Striar’s Flowers in Space. The festival concludes June 11 with “Three Genres of Improvisation: Contact Improvisation, Spontaneous Connections: Improvised Music, and Raise the Hoof: Tap,” with Patrick Crowley, Carly Czach, Rob Flax, Elise Knudson, Tim O’Donnell, and Sarah Young (contact improvisation), David Garland, Anaïs Maviel, and Roxane Butterfly (improvised music), and Jane Goldberg, Max Pollak, Brinae Ali, and Jennifer Vincent (tap). Among the other performers over the course of the festival are LAVA, Yasuko Yokoshi, Rachel Thorne Germond, Arthur Avilés, Emily Wexler, and Louise Moyes and the Daly Collective, who will deliver a free excerpt from If a Place Could Be Made: Kitty and Daniel Daly of St. Mary’s Bay Newfoundland, Had 12 Children, Six of Whom Were Very Tall and Six of Whom Had Achondroplasia, or Dwarfism.

DINE AROUND DOWNTOWN 2016

28 Liberty Plaza
Between Liberty & Pine and Nassau & William Sts.
Wednesday, June 8, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
Admission: free, dishes $3-$7
212-566-6700
www.downtownny.com

Sponsored by the Downtown Alliance and hosted by chef Alex Guarneschelli, the fifteenth annual Dine Around Downtown will feature signature dishes from more than forty Lower Manhattan restaurants, from pizza places and burger joints to steak and seafood houses. Among the participating eateries and what’s on their menu are ATRIO Wine Bar (Mediterranean grilled octopus salad, pulled pork sliders, whipped Mortadella crostini with pistachios), Barbalu (assorted crostini, tiramisu), Bavaria Bier Haus (steak sandwich and side salad, mac and cheese, sausages and mash), Beckett’s Bar and Grill (lobster slider, lobster mac and cheese), Delmonico’s (grilled steak sandwich, lobster bisque), Le District (Le District classic crêpe, Asian chicken crêpe, chocolate lollipops), Harry’s Café and Steak (grilled baby lamb chops, lobster-stuffed mushrooms), Haru (spicy tuna roll, fish tacos), the Ketch Brewhouse (crab cake sandwich, organic chicken slider, shrimp cocktail), OBAO (chicken and shrimp dumplings, chicken pad kee mao, chicken pad see ew), the Open Door Gastropub (pork belly BLT, bacon–mushroom mac and cheese), Pier A Harbor House (blackened swordfish taco, New England clam chowder), SUteiShi (scallop skewers, yuzu lemonade), and Ulysses’ Folk House (BBQ pork ribs with coleslaw, fried chicken with coleslaw). There will also be live music by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem All-Stars. Each plate goes for $3 to $7, with proceeds benefiting the Downtown Alliance, which “is striving to make Lower Manhattan a wonderful place to live, work, and play by creating a vibrant multi-use neighborhood.”

AN EVENING WITH THE WOMEN OF HOMELAND

Claire Danes will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on June 7 to discuss her Showtime hit, HOMELAND

Who: Claire Danes, Lesli Linka Glatter, James Wolcott
What: An Evening with the Women of Homeland
Where: Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway, 212-875-5050
When: Tuesday, June 7, $40, 7:00
Why: The world first fell in love with New York City native Claire Danes in 1994-95, when she spent two years playing Angela Chase on My So-Called Life, the popular drama about adolescence that also helped show that MTV was about more than just videos. So we’ve watched Danes grow up in public since she was fifteen, starring in such films as Romeo + Juliet, The Hours, and Stage Beauty as well as appearing on Broadway in Pygmalion and winning an Emmy for the 2010 HBO movie Temple Grandin, about a real-life inspirational autistic woman. But she has become best known for playing CIA operative Carrie Mathison (and serving as co-executive producer) on the Showtime hit Homeland for five seasons, a talented but troubled woman who suffers from bipolar disorder and a penchant for making questionable decisions but who will do just about anything to solve a problem. However, each time she does something major that is wholly unbelievable, making viewers consider to stop watching the series, she rights herself and we forgive her, compelled to see what she does next and how it affects her mentor, Saul (Mandy Patinkin). On June 7, Danes, who has won two Emmys as Chase, will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a special discussion with Homeland director and executive producer Lesli Linka Glatter, the longtime television fixture who has helmed multiple episodes of such series as Twin Peaks, The West Wing, Freaks and Geeks, Gilmore Girls, ER, House M.D., Mad Men, and The Newsroom, garnering three Emmy nominations. The former dancer and choreographer was also nominated for an Oscar for her 1984 short film Tales of Meeting and Parting with Sharon Oreck. The talk will be moderated by Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott, who wrote the following about Homeland’s fifth season, an episode of which will be screened as part of the event at the Walter Reade Theater: “If there were a special Emmy for prescience and conspicuous valor in truth-telling (admittedly, quite a mouthful for any TelePrompter reader), it would have to be presented to the brooding minds behind Showtime’s Homeland, whose fifth season has anticipated the horrific headlines of the last few weeks with the uncanny foreboding of a crystal ball where the future is a black swirling cloud.” The sixth season of Homeland is scheduled to premiere in January 2017.

THE GOD CELLS

A patient receives a controversial treatment in THE GOD CELLS

THE GOD CELLS: FETAL STEM CELL CONTROVERSY (Eric Merola, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, June 3
212-529-6799
stemcellsmovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com

In his 2014 documentary, Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan Kettering, writer, director, producer, and coeditor Eric Merola investigated the controversy over Laetrile, focusing on Memorial Sloan Kettering science writer Ralph W. Moss, PhD, and the banning of the cancer drug, which resulted in patients flocking to Mexico to receive treatment. Now Merola, whose two-part Burzynski explored the cancer therapy Antineoplastons, turns his attention to the stem-cell controversy in The God Cells, another important documentary that, unfortunately, suffers from some of the same filmmaking problems Second Opinion did. The pacing is awkward, the narrative overly biased, and alternating front and side shots of various speakers are needlessly disconcerting. The film also plays out like an infomercial for stem-cell treatment, which is banned in the United States, so Merola follows numerous patients to Mexico, where they receive the shots and many have experienced remarkable results. Although Merola does note the antiabortion movement’s religion-based fight against the use of stem cells, he instead reveals that the bigger issue in preventing their use in the U.S. is that the FDA is making it as difficult as possible to get the treatment approved because of its potential financial impact on Big Pharma and doctors, who benefit from people taking more and more drugs and coming back again and again for various other, arguably less-successful treatments.

Merola meets with men, women, and children who suffer from lupus, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, severe arthritis, and Parkinson’s, among other diseases, and who report nearly instantaneous recovery after stem-cell injections; in fact, they are shown golfing, rowing, and participating in other sports activities when previously they had trouble just walking. Also singing the praises of stem cells are former football quarterbacks John Brodie and Jerry Kramer and Laugh-In creator George Schlatter. While some doctors go on the record in support of stem cells, others are more hesitant, fearful of retribution from colleagues and the American medical industry. Merola spends too much time with CIRM, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and celebrity doctor William C. Rader of Stem Cell of America, outspoken proponents of stem-cell research. And the film features an overly long section on television director and producer David Barrett (Blue Bloods, Cold Case), who talks about how stem cells saved his life as well as that of his grandfather, ninety-nine-year-old Dave McCoy, who might be deserving of his own documentary. Interestingly, Barrett is the executive producer of The God Cells. Still, it’s a critically vital film that will open your eyes on yet another medical controversy that raises the question: Is corporate moneymaking more important than the health of the individual? The film opens at Cinema Village on June 3, with Merola and special guests participating in a Q&A following the 7:10 show that night.

THE WITNESS

The murder of Kitty Genovese is reinvestigated by one of her brothers in THE WITNESS

THE WITNESS (James Solomon, 2015)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 3
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.thewitness-film.com

The main image used to promote James Solomon’s debut documentary, The Witness, is a 1961 black-and-white photograph of Kitty Genovese. In the portrait, she stares back at the viewer almost accusingly; in light of her famous death three years later, it is as if she is calling us all out for the events that happened during and after her murder. In 1964, Genovese was killed by an assailant on a Kew Gardens street while, as the New York Times reported, thirty-eight neighbors heard the screams, looked out their windows, and did nothing. Forty years later, the paper reexamined the case and their coverage and found numerous holes in their original story. That set Kitty’s brother, Bill Genovese, who was sixteen when his sister was killed, on an obsessive mission to find out the truth about what really went down on March 13, 1964, and afterward, when New York City was publicly decried across the world as an awful oasis of urban apathy. Genovese hooked up with screenwriter Solomon (The Conspirator, The Bronx Is Burning) and spent eleven years reinvestigating the case — the two men had actually met in 1999, when Solomon was collaborating on a never-realized fictionalization of the story with Joe Berlinger and Alfred Uhry for HBO. The Witness plays out like a police procedural as Genovese follows every crumb he possibly can, meeting with witnesses, detectives, his sisters’ friends, and such journalists as Gabe Pressman, Mike Wallace, and Abe Rosenthal, the Times editor who wrote the book Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case, which helped turn the sordid tale into legend. “The story doesn’t make any sense to me,” Pressman admitted he thought back in 1964, although no one would question the Newspaper of Record. But Genovese does just that, and what he discovers is nothing short of shocking.

While The Witness sheds fascinating new light on the case — among the things that Genovese finds out is that the police were called and that his sister did not die alone in an apartment vestibule — it also, at long last, humanizes Kitty Genovese. No longer is she a mysterious figure whose unanswered screams came to represent all that was wrong with New York City in the 1960s but instead is revealed as a gregarious, popular young woman with a zest for life. By no means a criminal, she’s been memorialized by that 1961 photo, actually a mug shot taken after she was arrested on minor charges for bookmaking, having been a small player in a numbers racket from the lively bar where she worked. And that’s not the only way her character has been misrepresented over the years. However, the film moves way too slowly, and just as some of Bill’s siblings want him to stop his obsessive pursuit, there are many moments when you’ll want him to stop as well, particularly when he’s meeting with Steven Moseley, the son of Kitty’s killer, Winston Moseley, and when Bill and Solomon re-create the murder with an actress. Genovese was so deeply wounded by his sister’s death that he enlisted in the Marines and ended up losing both legs in Vietnam; he is seen at times making his way up stairs and driving and getting out of his car, inspirational moments that will have you cheering for him. Ultimately, The Witness proves that we can’t always believe what we read, even if it’s in the New York Times, while also absolving the city of at least some of its perceived sins of the past. The Witness opens at IFC Center on June 3; director James Solomon and Bill Genovese will be on hand for Q&As following the 7:05 show on June 3 (moderated by Sarah Heyward), the 7:05 show on June 4 (moderated by Clyde Haberman), and the 2:50 show on June 5 (moderated by Richard Price).