THE VILLAGE VOICE CHOICE EATS SEVENTH ANNUAL TASTING EVENT
Basketball City at Pier 36
299 South St. at Montgomery St.
Tuesday, March 25, $60 general admission, 7:00 – 10:00
21 and over only
www.villagevoice.com/choiceeats
There’s still time to get tickets to the seventh annual Village Voice Choice Eats festival, but you’ll need to move fast to score access to tastings from more than sixty New York City eateries, plus complimentary drinks, backgrounded by DJ DIIV and boasting a special Choice Sweets section upstairs. (Hint: Do not miss the Butter & Scotch table.) Dine and dash from line to line, meeting the chefs, but with access to so many vendors, Choice Eats can feel overwhelming. Make a plan: There are techniques for approaching this near-surfeit of goodness: Do a Manhattan vs. Brooklyn “lobster-off,” testing the rolls of East Seventh St.’s Luke’s Lobster vs. Van Brunt St.’s Red Hook Lobster Pound, or try to stay genre specific, pitting the meats of Mable’s Smokehouse in Brooklyn against Long Island City’s John Brown or Fletcher’s Brooklyn Barbecue. Or take an Asian tour from Larb Ubol’s Isan Thai to the Kati Roll Company to Tabata Noodle. You can also strategically make a trip across four boroughs by adding Staten Island’s Indian Clove to your culinary journey, but, alas, there are no eateries hailing from the Bronx. Every establishment has been featured on the pages of the Voice; among the other participating restaurants are Devi, Fonda, Max, Pete Zaaz, Sheep Station, the Pines, Bear, and Egg. Buy now; all the VIP tickets are already gone, and general admission will also sell out well in advance of the twenty-one-and-over-only March 25 event at Basketball City.
“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box). 
For forty years, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has been documenting the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel in such provocative and powerful films as Israel, Why; Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.; and his nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, Shoah. In 1997, he made A Visitor from the Living, built around a 1979 interview with International Red Cross worker Maurice Rossel, who led a delegation inspecting the Nazis’ so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, which turned out to be a glorified concentration camp. Lanzmann returns to the Czech camp in The Last of the Unjust, an utterly fascinating 218-minute documentary consisting of a series of interviews he conducted in Rome in 1975 with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the only Jewish Elder to survive the Holocaust. For years, Murmelstein, who was appointed directly by and reported to Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann, has been declared a Nazi collaborator, by writer Hannah Arendt and many others, even being arrested, imprisoned, and tried by Czech authorities. But in The Last of the Unjust, he paints a vivid portrait of everyday life in Theresienstadt, claiming he was not a collaborator but instead was doing whatever he could to improve conditions for the Jews there.
