The CMJ Music Marathon begins on October 15, kicking off five days of live music, panel discussions, talks, and other special events. Below are our suggestions for the first day, including the annual New Zealand showcase, Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, the Gutter Twins), and a gig by the recently reunited Bongos, whose “Numbers with Wings” appears above, from the Maxwell’s farewell concert.
“How to Survive as a Musician in 2013,” with Mike Fordham, Seth Kallen, Travis Morrison, Josh Roth, and Joe Vesayaporn, NYU Kimmel Center, room 905/907, 12:30
What Blog?!: Owel, 1:00; Traumahelikopter, 1:45; Conjjjecture, 2:30; the Box Tiger, 3:15; Beach Day, 4:00; Ghost Wave, 4:45; Milagres, 5:30; Pianos, 158 Ludlow St.
Niall Connolly, 2:00, Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen St.
The Outlet Collective: Ula Ruth, 4:30; Whale Belly, 5:10; Poory Remy, 5:50; Tam Lin, 6:30; Cold Blood Club, 7:10, Bowery Electric, 327 Bowery
NZ@CMJ: Tiny Ruins, 6:00; Black City Lights, 6:35; Eden Mulholland, 7:10; Streets of Laredo, 7:45; Ghost Wave, 8:20, (le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleecker St.
Oh My Rockness: Big Ups, 7:00; Greys, 8:00; Ovlov, 9:00; PUP, 10:00; Kirin J Callinan, 11:00; Hunters, 12 midnight, Cameo Gallery, 93 North Sixth St.
The Bongos, 8:00, the Living Room, 54 Ludlow St.
Mark Lanegan, 9:45, Gramercy Theater, 127 East 23rd St.
Banners CMJ Party: Bored Nothing, 9:00; Total Slacker, 9:15; Honduras, 9:45; Spires, 10:00; How Sad, 10:30, Pianos, 158 Ludlow St.
Radical Dads, 12 midnight, Muchmore, 2 Havermeyer St.
The recent fiftieth-anniversary restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague classic, Breathless, which came out in 2010, will leave audiences, well, breathless. Godard’s first feature-length film, buoyed by an original treatment by François Truffaut and with Claude Chabrol serving as technical adviser, is as much about the cinema itself as it is about would-be small-time gangster Michel Poiccard (an iconic Jean-Paul Belmondo), an ultra-cool dude wandering from girl to girl in Paris, looking for extra helpings of sex and money and having trouble getting either. Along the way he steals a car and shoots a cop as if shooing away a fly before teaming up with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) and heading out on the run. Godard references William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett, Humphrey Bogart and Sam Fuller as Michel and Patricia make faces at each other, discuss death, and are chased by the police. Anarchy prevails, both in Belmondo’s character and the film as a whole, which can go off in any direction at any time. Godard himself shows up as the man who identifies Michel, and there are also cameos by New Wave directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Rivette. The beautiful restoration, supervised by the film’s director of photography, Raoul Coutard, also includes a new translation and subtitles that breathe new life into one of cinema’s greatest treasures. Breathless is screening in a 35mm print October 15 at 9:30 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the expansive Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Jean-Luc Godard — The Spirit of the Forms,” which continues through October 31 with such other Godard works as British Sounds, Comment ça va, Détective, Every Man for Himself, First Name: Carmen, France/Tour/Detour/Deux enfants, and many more.
Korean Cultural Service continues its three-part tribute to South Korean auteur Park Cheol Soo, who died in a traffic accident earlier this year at the age of sixty-four, with the erotically charged The Green Chair. Shortly after being arrested for having sex with a minor, thirty-two-year-old Kim Mun-hee (Seo Jung) rejoins her barely underage lover, nineteen-year-old Hyun (Shim Ji-ho), as they continue their torrid affair, which led to Mun-hee’s divorce. Mun-hee is sentenced to one hundred hours of social service, working in a ward with women suffering from dementia. A concerned police detective (Sun Wook-hyun) and a sneaky journalist (Kim Jun-han) try to keep close tabs on the lovers, so Hyun and Mun-hee soon end up at the country home of her best friend, Jean (Oh Yun-hong), as things keep heating up, both sexually and emotionally. Park fills the first half of The Green Chair with beautiful shots of Mun-hee’s and Hyun’s naked bodies in artistic arrangements, almost like they are one. But in the second half, things get a bit more abstract, culminating in a bizarre, surreal party that incorporates some of the stranger elements of the French New Wave. The Green Chair ends up being a satisfying, if at times extremely confusing and even maddening, exploration of fantasy, desire, and responsibility, not shy in the least. The Green Chair is screening for free October 15 at Tribeca Cinemas as part of the Korean Movie Night series “Remembering Park Cheol Soo: A Korean Filmmaking Legend,” which began October 1 with Park’s 301, 302 and concludes October 29 with B.E.D.
