Multiple locations in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan
Saturday, May 2 free
bookstoredaynyc.com
More than two dozen independent bookstores in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens are participating in Independent Bookstore Day on May 2, with signings, readings, lectures, film screenings, art exhibits, children’s activities, giveaways, games, food tastings, discussions, and, in several cases, free beer, to steer you clear of Amazon and B&N. Guitarist Gary Lucas will be performing live at bookbook on Bleecker St. Paul Durham, Matt Myklusch, Michael Northrop, Dianne K. Salerni, and Josh Lieb join together for a Fantastic Middle Grade panel at Books of Wonder. Amy Hest, Chris Raschka, Deborah Heligman, and Cynthia Weill are among a dozen authors and illustrators who will be at Bank Street Book Store. Housing Works will host a Kidlit Game Show emceed by C. Alexander London. Colm Tóibín, Eileen Myles, Joseph O’Neill, DJ Spooky, Said Sayrafiezadeh, and others are among the literati taking part in a marathon Langston Hughes reading at McNally Jackson. Jon Scieszka will lead a Mad Scientist Party at the Community Bookstore, followed by an evening celebration with Paul Auster, William Corbett, and Felix Harr. The powerHouse Arena will launch Luke’s Lobster’s Real Maine Food, with sample treats. And Raina Telgemeier and Dave Roman will be team captains in a game of Pictionary at the Astoria Bookshop during this first-ever national Independent Bookstore Day.
An adventurer as much as a filmmaker, German director Werner Herzog has headed into the Amazon in Fitzcarraldo (1982), burning Kuwaiti oil fields in Lessons of Darkness (1992), and Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World (2008). In his 2010 documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, he goes where few have ever gone before. In December 1994, speleologists Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel, and Christian Hillaire discovered the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France, a vast series of chambers filled with remarkable paintings and engravings as well as animal bones, including the skulls of the extinct cave bear. The works were painted onto and carved into the walls, not limited to flat surfaces but around formations that jut out into the cavern. Dating back more than thirty thousand years, they are the oldest cave paintings ever found, well preserved through crystallization over the centuries and now by the intense and careful protection of the French government. Only a handful of scientists have been given access to the cave, until last spring, when Herzog, who has been entranced by cave paintings since he was twelve years old, was allowed to bring in a shoestring crew using specially devised equipment to film the space over the course of six four-hour sessions. The four-person crew — including Herzog manning the lights and his longtime cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, behind the 3D camera — were not allowed to touch anything and had to stay on a narrow metal walkway that winds through the cave. They were accompanied by a team of specialists on the rare public journey: handprint expert Dominique Baffier, cave bear researcher Michel Philippe, the husband and wife team of Gilles Tosello and Carole Fritz, who map out the social connection between art and archaeology, Jean Clottes, the former director of the Chauvet Cave Research Project, and current director Jean-Michel Geneste.
“I like individuality,” self-described “geriatric starlet” and nonagenarian fashion doyenne Iris Apfel says at the beginning of octogenarian Albert Maysles’s penultimate film, Iris. “It’s so lost these days. There’s so much sameness. Everything is homogenized. I hate it. Whatever.” Iris celebrates that individuality, not only Apfel’s, who at ninety-three is still active in the fashion world, but Maysles’s, who passed away in March at the age of eighty-eight, leaving behind a legendary legacy that changed the face of documentary cinema, including such classics as Salesman, Grey Gardens, and Gimme Shelter. Throughout the film, Apfel speaks directly to Maysles, who ends up on camera several times, breaking that once-impenetrable fourth wall that he, his brother, David, and their partner, Charlotte Zwerin, helped tear down years ago. Maysles spent four years filming the Queens-born Apfel as she shared her lovely story, growing from an interior designer and textile-business owner to a world-renowned fashion collector, tastemaker, and rule breaker, accompanied all along the way by her husband of more than sixty-six years, Carl. Maysles shows Iris, in her trademark enormous circular-framed glasses and unique, colorful ensembles that mix designer clothing with a healthy dose of inexpensive accessories, as she bargains at a cheap local store, advises women at a special Loehmann’s event, prepares for her 2005 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, hawks her jewelry line on the Home Shopping Network, works on a window display at Bergdorf Goodman, and talks fashion with Martha Stewart, Tavi Gevinson, and others. Maysles interviews such designers as Alexis Bittar, Duro Olowu, Naeem Khan, and Dries van Noten, Met curator Harold Koda, Architectural Digest editor in chief Margaret Russell, and J. Crew head Jenna Lyons, who have only the most kind and generous things to say about the always positive Apfel, who has a genuine love of life. “It’s better to be happy than well dressed,” she tells friend and photographer Bruce Weber.
