THE FESTIVAL OF SANTIAGO APOSTOL
105th St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
July 24-26, free www.facebook.com
The annual celebration of James the Greater, known as the Loiza Festival del Barrio and the Festival of Santiago Apostol, takes place this weekend on East 105th St., three days that focus on the African influence of the Puerto Rican community of Loíza on New York City with live entertainment, family-friendly activities, a religious processional, and a tribute to those affected by the March 2014 gas explosion on 116th St. On Friday, Taino Towers Day: El Barrio Fuerte . . . !Basta Ya! features art workshops, storytelling, children’s games, and music by 5 en Plena and salsa music and dance from Swing y Sabor. On Saturday, there will be a special installation of La Casita/La’Kay (with Adrian “Viajero” Roman, Manny Vega, Sophia Dawson, David Zayas, and Damaris Cruz) and live music by DJ Geko Jones, the Palladium Mambo All Stars, !BOMBA YO!, Johnny Olivo & Herencia de Plena, Jose Mangual & Son Boricua, and !Retumba! On Sunday, the processional kicks off at 12:30 at Iglesia Catolica de la Santa Agonía, with Frankie Vasquez as Padrino and Olga Rosa as La Madrina, followed by live performances by Danza Fiesta, Legacy Women, Milteri Tucker y Bombazo Dance Company, Tipica 73, Evelyn Jimenez y Orgullo Taino, and the Family Affair Mambo Dance team.
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through July 25, free
212-675-8672 pavelzoubok.com www.lauriefrick.com
Earlier this year, the Guggenheim’s “On Kawara — Silence” retrospective highlighted the fascinating oeuvre of the Japanese Conceptual artist who detailed nearly every aspect of his life, keeping track of what time he woke up, who he saw, where he went, and what he did via notebooks, postcards, newspaper articles, telegrams, and date paintings. Former tech executive and engineer Laurie Frick takes that decidedly analog view of existence into the social-media-dominated twenty-first century with “Who are you? What day is it?,” an involving series of works that use data mining to create colorful depictions of time and personal experience by using rectilinear units of different color and size to indicate various activities and lengths of time spent on them. In “Time-slices,” the Austin- and New York City-based artist adapts data compiled by microbiologist Ben Lipkowitz, who exists on a twenty-six-hour sleep cycle, into wall sculptures of grids of small blocks of multiple sizes and hues arranged on shelves that suggest a kind of library. Another series, “7 Days,” follows the lives of a man and a woman in strictly linear fashion, forming a collection of narrow, vertical totems that evoke measuring sticks, taking stock of what these two people do on a daily basis for one week. And in “Leather Blocks,” Frick maps her own use of technology through Manictime, visualizing it as hundreds of tiny blocks winding across a wall. Using physically measurable objects that evoke such antique information technologies as children’s blocks and books on a shelf or even yardsticks, she simultaneously calls to mind the immaterial square pixels and blocks of digital information that our various apps use to analyze and show us our data. “Your job as an artist is to really pay attention to yourself, and sometimes those observations get eventually explained by science,” Frick said in a 2013 TEDx Talk in Austin. Frick, whose free FRICKbits app, “the ultimate data-selfie,” gives people the opportunity to “take back your data and turn it into art,” has done just that with “Who are you? What day is it?” First and foremost, it grabs your attention with its three-dimensional patterns and eye-catching color schemes, but upon further examination, it shares data that, although about other people, will make you consider your own use of time and technology. “I’m not naive about data privacy,” she says in the TEDx Talk, referencing various ways companies gather information about you. “My sense right now is, they measure me, now I measure me. You have data; I have data. Fight back!” Frick does just that, and makes it a whole lot of fun in the process.
Randy Newman will be performing a free outdoor concert at Lincoln Center on July 25
Damrosch Park Bandshell
Amsterdam Ave. between 62nd & 63rd Sts.
Saturday, July 25, free, 7:00 randynewman.com lcoutofdoors.org
Singer-songwriter Randy Newman has had his trigger finger on the pulse of the dark side of America for five decades, with a particularly wry focus on the south and the economy. Melding pop, rock, blues, folk, and Tin Pan Alley, the seventy-one-year-old Newman, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, has been commenting on the state of things for nearly fifty years, and he’ll be making a rare appearance in New York City on July 25, playing a free show in Damrosch Park as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors summer festival, along with Wycliffe Gordon and His International All-Stars and Lil Buck. The sardonic, cynical, bitterly funny Newman was born in Los Angeles and spent parts of his childhood in Louisiana, and he got a good look at both Hollywood and New Orleans. He mixes the flavor of both in clever songs filled with sarcastic, ironic humor, bittersweet romance, and sharp insight. He celebrates capitalism, in his own unique way, in such songs as “It’s Money That I Love” (“Used to worry about the poor / But I don’t worry anymore / Used to worry about the black man / Now I don’t worry about the black man / Used to worry about the starving children of India / You know what I say now about the starving children of India? / I say, ‘Oh mama’ / It’s money that I love”) and “It’s Money That Matters.” He takes on fame in “Lonely at the Top” and “My Life Is Good” (“The other afternoon / My wife and I / Took a little ride into / Beverly Hills / Went to the private school / Our oldest child attends / Many famous people send their children there / This teacher says to us / ‘We have a problem here / This child just will not do / A thing I tell him to / And he’s such a big old thing / He hurts the other children / All the games they play, he plays so rough’ / Hold it, teacher / Wait a minute / Maybe my ears are clogged or somethin’ / Maybe I’m not understanding / The English language / Dear, you don’t seem to realize / My life is good, you old bag”). An atheist, he tackles religion in such tracks as “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)” (“I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee / From the squalor and the filth and the misery / How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me / That’s why I love mankind”) and “Harps and Angels. He also has written tender, heartbreaking ballads (“Marie,” “Real Emotional Girl”) and songs made popular by others (“You Can Leave Your Hat On” by Joe Cocker, “Mama Told Me Not to Come” by Three Dog Night). But it’s his songs about race that resonate the most now.
After releasing six studio records in the first eleven years of his career, Newman has made only four in the last thirty-five years, instead following in the footsteps of his uncles and cousins, composing soundtracks for more than two dozen films, from A Bug’s Life,Cars, and the Toy Story series to Ragtime,The Natural, and Meet the Parents, earning twenty Oscar nominations (with two wins) to go along with three Emmys and six Grammys. But Newman is nothing if not a political junkie, and he’s never shied away from hot-button topics, from slavery and racism in “Christmas in Capetown” and “Rednecks” to poverty in “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)” and “The World Isn’t Fair.” Singing such lines as “In America you’ll get food to eat / Won’t have to run through the jungle / And scuff up your feet / You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day / It’s great to be an American” in “Sail Away” and “They got little baby legs / That stand so low / You got to pick ’em up / Just to say hello” in “Short People,” Newman has found himself misunderstood and becoming the subject of controversy. But we need Randy Newman, perhaps more than ever now, as wealth inequality grows, racism keeps rising up, and wars seem inevitable. “No one likes us — I don’t know why / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try / But all around, even our old friends put us down / Let’s drop the big one and see what happens,” he offers in “Political Science,” continuing, “We give them money — but are they grateful? / No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful / They don’t respect us — so let’s surprise them / We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.” In his 2007 song “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” a public response to what he deemed the failures of the Bush administration, Newman sang, “The end of an Empire is messy at best / And this Empire is ending / Like all the rest / Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea / We’re adrift in the land of the brave and the home of the free.” On Saturday night we’ll hear what thoughts he has on America today.
A twelve-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) looks through dark shadows in IVAN’S CHILDHOOD
IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (MY NAME IS IVAN) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, July 24, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777 madmuseum.org
In his 1986 book Sculpting in Time, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “I have to admit that before the appearance of my first full-length work, Ivan’s Childhood, I did not feel that I was a director, nor did the cinema have any inkling of my existence.” That was certainly not the case after the film was released, as it won the Golden Lion at Venice, earned the praises of Jean-Paul Sartre, and went on to have a profound impact on global cinema. Based on a 1957 short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, Ivan’s Childhood is a magnificent tale of a fearless twelve-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) who spies for the Soviets during World War II. But for all of his outward toughness, he is still a child who dreams of another, safer life, wrapped in the welcoming arms of his dead mother (Irma Raush, Tarkovsky’s first wife). Shot in black-and-white by Vadim Yusov, the film opens with Ivan standing behind a large spiderweb, as if being captured in this fateful world is inevitable. The smiling, clean Ivan admires flora and fauna as he floats through the air, but when he comes back to the ground, he sees torn roots that remind him of the family he’s lost to the war and is eventually woken up from this dream and finds himself in the middle of a vast, burned-out landscape littered with death. He ultimately meets up with Capt. Kholin (Valentin Zubkov), Lt. Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), Cpl. Katasonov (Stepan Krylov), and Lt. Col. Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko) in a bunker, where the men decide that it is best for Ivan to go to the state military academy instead of continuing his dangerous reconnaissance missions. But Ivan, whose face is no longer clean but will seemingly be dirty forever, insists that he belongs with them, fighting the Germans. Of course, war is no place for a child, but there is no child quite like Ivan.
IVAN’S CHILDHOOD features breathtaking shots of life during WWII
The first full-length masterpiece of Tarkovsky’s short but brilliant career — he made seven films, in addition to the wonderful short The Steamroller and the Violin, which he wrote with Andrei Konchalovsky, before dying of cancer in 1986 at the age of fifty-four — Ivan’s Childhood is filled with unforgettable shots and poignant vignettes that establish the horrors of war and its effects on the Soviet Union. At one point, Ivan runs away and encounters an old man (Dmitri Milyutenko) pining for his wife as he cowers behind a rickety door in the open air, where his house used to be. In one of the film’s most famous and influential scenes, Capt. Kholin pursues a nurse, Masha (Valentina Malyavina), through a field of white birch trees; he ultimately catches and kisses her, holding her over a trench, his feet on either side of the narrow ditch, her feet dangling in the air, the birches rising in the distance behind him, a breathtaking image that is as ominous as it is beautiful. Later, Ivan feels trapped in a dark room; holding a flashlight and a knife, he rings an alarm bell, then cowers in tears, shown in silhouette, as bombings begin. Soon he is dreaming of happily sharing an apple with a young girl in the rain, the background shown in negative, the symbolism evoking potential tragedy as the girl grows increasingly sadder. Ivan might represent the future of the Soviet Union, but he is experiencing a childhood that no one should, surrounded by death and doom and devastation, his fate inevitable. All four of his dreams involve water, a metaphor for life, but he is drowning in memories (based on Tarkovsky’s own) that do him no good anymore. Tarkovsky made Ivan’s Childhood right out of film school, adapting a screenplay written by Mikhail Papava and working with a tight budget and deadline. Yet he, composer Vyacheslav Ovchinikov, set designer Evgeny Chemyayev, and Yusov were able to produce a spectacular film, a deeply psychological exploration of the end of innocence in the midst of war. “To be honest, in making my first film I had another objective: to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director,” Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time. “In order to come to a definite conclusion I left the reins slack, as it were. I tried not to hold myself back. If the film turns out well, I thought, then I’ll have the right to work in the cinema. Ivan’s Childhood was therefore specially important. It was my qualifying examination.” It was also an unqualified success, leading to one of the great, albeit too brief, careers in cinema.
Ivan’s Childhood is screening July 24 at 7:00 as part of the the Museum of Arts & Design film series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s masterpieces (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was a superior craftsman whose cinematic oeuvre is filled with poetry and wonder, mystery and self-examination, exploring life and death, the past, the present, and the future, incorporating mesmerizing sound and visuals in telling complex stories like one else before or since.
Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) takes a good look at himself in Fritz Lang classic
M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Wednesday, July 22, 10:00
Series continues through August 5
212-727-8110 filmforum.org
Fritz Lang’s first sound film, following such classic silent works as Metropolis and Die Nibelungen, is a masterpiece of precision, a crime thriller nonpareil in its examination of a serial killer, mob justice, and the psychological nature of good and evil. In M — Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, Peter Lorre stars as Hans Beckert, a creepy young man who befriends children before abducting and murdering them. Even with a reward out for his capture, he can’t stop himself from taking yet more little girls, in broad daylight, and writing letters to the police and a local newspaper, practically daring them to catch him. As his spree continues, the local community grows more and more frightened and suspicious, and men and women start looking suspiciously at anyone who even so much as nods to a child on the streets, mass hysteria beckoning. As the police try to figure out a plan of action, the criminals band together and hire beggars to try to track down Beckert, since the larger police presence is negatively impacting their business. Eventually, Beckert, who has a fondness for whistling Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” is spotted with a child, leading to a series of scenes that are simply spectacular in the flow of their movement as the riveting denouement approaches.
In making M, Lang was inspired by real events involving multiple serial killers. Although the film in no way preaches, Lang, who cowrote the script with his then-wife, Thea von Harbou, considered M very much a message picture. On May 20, 1931, he wrote in the German newspaper Die Filmwoche, “If this film based on factual reports helps to point an admonishing and warning finger at the unknown, lurking threat, the chronic danger emanating from the constant presence among us of compulsively and criminally inclined individuals, forming, so to speak, a latent potential that may devour our lives in flames—and especially the lives of the most helpless among us—and if the film also helps, perhaps, even to avert this danger, then it will have served its highest purpose and drawn the logical conclusion from the quintessential facts assembled in it.” M feels eerily prescient and especially relevant today, when parents’ fear for the safety of their children has perhaps never been greater. Seeing adults waiting outside schools, praying for their kids to be out of harm’s way, is something that can now be witnessed across America day after day.
Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) doesn’t like what he sees in M
Lorre (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Maltese Falcon) is exceptional as Beckert, a baby-faced man who might not be quite as evil as everyone imagines. Lang and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner (Nosferatu, Diary of a Lost Girl) regularly show Beckert in shadow and in mirrors, as if there are two sides to this child killer. Lang uses no musical score, instead allowing natural sound, and very often pure silence, as Lang (Fury, Ministry of Fear) recognizes that he doesn’t need to overplay his hand. As depicted in the film, if there’s one thing that everyone can agree on, from cops and criminals to blind balloon sellers and mothers and fathers, it’s that there is nothing worse than a man who murders children. Yet Lang ultimately is able to extract some sympathy for Beckert, who makes a powerful plea near the end of the film. Watching M is a gripping, unforgettable experience, despite its terrifying subject matter.
M is screening July 22 at 10:00 as part of Film Forum’s “True Crime” series, which continues through August 5 with such other ripped-from-the-headlines favorites as Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, Tadashi Imai’s Darkness at Noon, John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and double features of Richard Fleischer’s The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and Compulsion and William Friedkin’s The French Connection and The Brink’s Job.
Sally Timms and Jon Langford fight the curse of the Mekons in stirring documentary
REVENGE OF THE MEKONS (Joe Angio, 2013)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Wednesday, July 22, $15, 9:45
718-384-3980 www.mekonsmovie.com www.nitehawkcinema.com
Called “the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll” by Lester Bangs, the Mekons have been making some of the best music on the planet for more than thirty-five years. But despite a rabid fan base and constant critical adoration, the band, which formed at the University of Leeds back in 1977, has never quite made the big time. Joe Angio captures the wild, DIY spirit of this unique music and art collective in the stirring documentary Revenge of the Mekons. Angio (How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company [and Enjoy It]) follows the self-deprecating band — the members of which are quick to joke about their lack of financial and popular success, especially when they’re onstage and learn from fans that an upcoming gig has been canceled — as they celebrate their thirtieth anniversary and record their most recent excellent album, Ancient and Modern. Angio talks with the current Mekons lineup, which includes cofounders Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford along with Susie Honeyman, Rico Bell, Lu Edmonds, Sarah Corina, Steve Goulding, and Sally Timms, as well as such former members as Kevin Lycett, Mark “Chalkie” White, Andy Corrigan, and Dick Taylor, as they recount the band’s rollicking history, beginning with its Leeds days as a socialist punk band battling over shows with Gang of Four through its mid-1980s transformation into alt-country folk rockers.
Mekons doc is one helluva wild and crazy ride, just like their long career
Angio mixes in amazing raw footage from the 1970s with more contemporary scenes as the Mekons, with their usual reckless abandon and utter joyfulness, play such songs as “Where Were You,” “The Hope and the Anchor,” “Ghosts of American Astronauts,” “Millionaire,” “Hello Cruel World,” “Hard to Be Human,” “Memphis, Egypt,” and “The Curse.” Sharing their love of all things Mekons are such wide-ranging pundits as Jonathan Franzen, Greil Marcus, Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham and Andy Gill, Will Oldham, Greg Kot, Craig Finn, Luc Sante, Mary Harron, and performance artist Vito Acconci. Back in October 2011, we wrote that “a world that includes the Mekons is just a better place for everyone,” and that still holds true. So start by watching this wonderfully crazy documentary, about a group of crazy characters who have formed a crazy kind of family, then go out and pick up such seminal records as Fear and Whiskey, The Mekons Honky Tonkin’, So Good It Hurts, The Mekons Rock‘n’Roll, Natural, Ancient Modern, etc., and be sure to catch them live — the full band will be in town July 21 for a show at Bowery Ballroom, and there are still a few tickets left. However, their Mekonception performance at Jalopy on Thursday night, in which they will be recording their next record, is sold out. Revenge of the Mekons is screening July 22 as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s “One Nite Only” and “Music Driven” series, and Angio will be on hand for a Q&A with members of the band, so you have several chances to see just what you’ve been missing.
Who: Mother Mother and PushMethod, with special guests NoMBe and David Correy What:Hoodies for the Homeless Where:Brooklyn Bowl, 61 Wythe Ave. between North Eleventh & Twelfth Sts. When: Tuesday, July 21, $10, 8:00 Why: It might be blazing hot outside right now, but there are a whole lot of homeless New Yorkers who could use additional clothing when the weather gets much cooler. Wanting to do more than just give spare change to people living on the street and in shelters, PushMethod leader Tavis Sage Eaton started Hoodies for the Homeless, a grassroots initiative whose mission is “to help provide warm clothing for the less fortunate during the winter months as well as to raise awareness about the amounts of people that are displaced and how to help them.” Hoodies 4 the Homeless’s next event is July 21 at Brooklyn Bowl, where fans are encouraged to bring a new or gently used hoodie to donate to the cause. If you can’t make it to the show, you can contribute by buying a hoodie from Wreck Shop Movement, which will be donating a hoodie for each one purchased. (Plus, each hoodie comes with a sticker, a pin, and music downloads from a Wreck Shop recording artist.)
In his 1986 book Sculpting in Time, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “I have to admit that before the appearance of my first full-length work, Ivan’s Childhood, I did not feel that I was a director, nor did the cinema have any inkling of my existence.” That was certainly not the case after the film was released, as it won the Golden Lion at Venice, earned the 
Called “the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll” by Lester Bangs, 
