twi-ny recommended events

TWI-NY TALK: DICK VALENTINE OF ELECTRIC SIX

Dick Valentine and Electric Six ride into the city in support of latest album, MUSTANG

ELECTRIC SIX
Bowery Ballroom
6 Delancey St. between Bowery & Christie St.
Sunday, September 29, $18-$20, 9:00
212-533-2111
www.electricsix.com
www.boweryballroom.com

For nearly fifteen years, unpredictable Detroit band Electric Six has been having a blast, playing wild and crazy live shows and releasing such intoxicating albums as Danger! High Voltage, Señor Smoke, the splendidly titled I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master, and Heartbeats and Brainwaves. Although they’ve gone through numerous personnel changes, Tyler Spencer, aka Dick Valentine, has always been front and center, the group’s primary songwriter and lead vocalist. On their new record, the galloping Mustang (Metropolis, October 8), Valentine, guitarists Da Ve and Johnny Na$hinal, bassist Smorgasbord, drummer Percussion World, and keyboardist Tait Nucleus? take listeners on a rollicking journey through multiple genres, from the opening blast of “Nom de Plume” to the yearning ballad “Iron Dragon” to the Nick Cave/Roxy Music-like finale, “Cheryl vs. Darryl.” Electric Six brought its “Save the World, Save the World” tour to the Bell House this past Wednesday and will next be at Bowery Ballroom on September 29 with My Jerusalem and Les Sans Culottes. While in town, Valentine discussed with twi-ny the new record, Adam Levine, and the misspelling on the cover of Mustang.

twi-ny: Mustang explodes out of the speakers in a burst of heavy metal, punk, funk, hard rock, prog rock, black metal, disco, dance pop, and other styles. What is your songwriting process like? Do you set out to tackle specific genres in advance?

Dick Valentine: We just knew that having just done a synth and drum machine record for our previous studio release, we wanted to have a lot of guitars on this album. And live drums on every track. I have to say of all the albums we’ve done, this was the one where I came with the least amount of concrete ideas and finished songs on my end, so the rest of the guys, especially John Nash, really stepped up and got it done.

twi-ny: On “Adam Levine,” you tell the Maroon 5 frontman and “The Voice” coach to “burn in hell, motherfucker”; tell us, how do you really feel about him? Are personalities like Adam Levine good or bad for the music industry?

Dick Valentine: This song is not actually about Adam Levine. . . . That’s a popular misconception. It’s about feeling awful and then feeling worse because you know it will just continue. I’ve never met him, but he seems like a fine example of a human being. A human being who grew up in Beverly Hills. As far as his impact on the music industry, you’d have to ask Donny Osmond because that’s where this shit started.

twi-ny: In the past, you’ve said that your songs are “about absolutely nothing,” so should we not read any political metaphors into “Late Night Obama Food,” especially when you say, “We are starving, but we’re eating more than we ever did before”?

Dick Valentine: Yeah, that’s right.

twi-ny: Going back to “I Buy the Drugs” for a moment, what actually happens if you send a self-addressed stamped envelope to P.O. Box 900, Los Angeles, CA 90212?

Dick Valentine: I have heard it has something to do with FOX broadcasting. That was not intentional, but that makes sense as I believe that ZIP Code does in fact cover Century City and Westwood.

twi-ny: In “Gimme the Eyes,” you say, “When you come to New York see what your money buys.” You played the Bell House on September 25 and will be at Bowery Ballroom on September 29; what do you spend your money on when you’re here in the city?

Dick Valentine: Diapers. In a Park Slope parent way, not in a David Vitter way.

twi-ny: We can’t let you go without asking about the cover of Mustang; what was your initial reaction when you saw that the band’s name was misspelled on the back of the woman’s jean jacket?

Dick Valentine: We were elated.

DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL 2013

Micah Stansell’s “Inversion (with Water)” combines sound and image in the Manhattan Bridge Archway & Anchorage

Multiple venues in DUMBO
September 27-29, free
www.dumboartsfestival.com

More than two hundred thousand visitors are expected to take part in the seventeenth annual Dumbo Arts Festival this weekend, running Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday. The streets and galleries will be home to three days of art, music, site-specific installation, workshops, open studios, and live performances, with everything free. The New York Photo Festival will be hosting the New York Photo Awards at 37 Main St., Gleason’s Gym is sponsoring “The Art of Boxing” at 77 Front St., “DADA’s Playground” will include family-friendly sculptures in the Kidlot, Mighty Tanaka welcomes people to the work of street artist Skewville in “Welcome to Skewville,” United Photo Industries’ “Photoville” continues on Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 5, Anthony Heinz May’s “Appropriation of Nature” can be found on the park’s John St. Path, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s “Ship of Tolerance” sails into East River Cove, Abhaya Yoga will hold “Live Beats & Yoga Flow” at 10 Jay St., Clifford Ross & Taikoza’s “Immersive Harmonium Video and Japanese Drums” and Micah Stansell’s “Inversion (with Water)” take advantage of the Manhattan Bridge Archway & Anchorage, Andrey Bartenev and Mei Ann Teo’s “Bubbles of Hope” will roam all around the area, Amelia Marzec’s “New American Sweatshop” repurposes electronic waste into communication devices at 85 Washington St., dancers Jake Bone, Lynda Senisi, Damani Pompey, Ellyn Sjoquist and Alessandra Delle Grotti will perform Kensaku Shinohara’s “Math Time” on Main St., and CAM, DALeast, Eltono, Shepard Fairey, Faith47, MOMO, Stefan Sagmeister, and Yuko Shimizu will decorate DUMBO Walls in Bridge Park Two.

Andrey Bartenev and Mei Ann Teo’s “Bubbles of Hope” will roam around DUMBO on Saturday afternoon

There are lots of interactive installations, including the Heather Hart Experience’s “Bartertown (Trading Post Xi: The Magic Feathers),” in which participants can exchange objects, ideas, and just about anything else; Daina Taimina’s “Hyperbolic Hyperbolic Hyperbolic,” involving crocheting and paper cut-outs; Samuel Jablon and the Underpass Poets’ “Poet Sculpture” will feature readings on movable crates (by Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo, Vito Acconci, and many others, as well as an open mic); Rev. Lainie Love Dalby will bless festivalgoers as part of “HUMBO (Hope Under the Manhattan Bridge Underpass): A Blessing Performance to Burst Open Your He(art)”; the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective will present “Sublime,” interactive performance art pieces by Monica Jahan Bose, Ruby Chishti, Anjali Deshmukh, Swati Khurana, and Sunita S. Mukhi; and Kaloyan Ivanov’s “Void Simulacrum” invites the audience to work on a fifty-foot-long piece of fabric by Jane’s Carousel.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: A TOUCH OF SIN

Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) is one of four protagonists who break out into sudden acts of shocking violence in Jia Zhangke’s A TOUCH OF SIN

A TOUCH OF SIN (TIAN ZHU DING) (Jia Zhangke, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Saturday, September 28, 6:00
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Wednesday, October 2, 8:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

During his sixteen-year career, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has made both narrative works (The World, Platform, Still Life) and documentaries (Useless, I Wish I Knew), with his fiction films containing elements of nonfiction and vice versa. Such is the case with his latest film, the powerful A Touch of Sin, which explores four based-on-fact outbreaks of shocking violence in four different regions of China. In Shanxi, outspoken miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) won’t stay quiet about the rampant corruption of the village elders. In Chongqing, married migrant worker and father Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) obtains a handgun and is not afraid to use it. In Hubei, brothel receptionist Ziao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime muse and now wife) can no longer take the abuse and assumptions of the male clientele. And in Dongguan, young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) tries to make a life for himself but is soon overwhelmed by his lack of success. Inspired by King Hu’s 1971 wuxia film A Touch of Zen, Jia also owes a debt to Max Ophüls’s 1950 bittersweet romance La Ronde, in which a character from one segment continues into the next, linking the stories. In A Touch of Sin, there is also a character connection in each successive tale, though not as overt, as Jia makes a wry, understated comment on the changing ways that people connect in modern society. In depicting these four acts of violence, Jia also exposes the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor and the social injustice that is prevalent all over contemporary China — as well as the rest of the world — leading to dissatisfied individuals fighting for their dignity in extreme ways. A gripping, frightening film that earned Jia the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes this year, A Touch of Sin is an official selection of the fifty-first New York Film Festival, screening September 28 at Alice Tully Hull and October 2 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with Jia and Zhao participating in a Q&A following the first show. (The film then opens October 4 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center.)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: ANNA NICOLE

Sarah Joy Miller is front and center in glamorous production of ANNA NICOLE at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Through September 28, $25-$235
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.roh.org.uk

If Anna Nicole ends up being New York City Opera’s final presentation, then the organization (founded in 1943 and dubbed the People’s Opera by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia) is certainly going out with quite a, well, bang. Commissioned by London’s Royal Opera House and originally performed at Covent Garden, Anna Nicole is a playfully entertaining pop operetta based on the life of celebrity diva Anna Nicole Smith, following her life from her early years as Vickie Lynn Hogan in Mexia, Texas, through her apprenticeship as a stripper in Houston and then her success as a model in print ads and as Playboy Playmate of the Year. Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, librettist Richard Thomas, and director Richard Jones tell the tale chronologically as Anna Nicole (Sarah Joy Miller) argues with her mother (Susan Bickley), marries and divorces her first husband, Billy Boy (Ben Davis), visits Doctor Yes (Richard Troxell) to get a huge pair of golden Winnebagos, meets and marries billionaire octogenarian J. Howard Marshall II (Robert Brubaker), and becomes a tabloid regular and reality TV superstar. It’s all bright lights and flashy colors on Miriam Buether’s wonderfully cheesy sets and Nicky Gillibrand’s riotous costumes while the cast, which includes sixty-six members of the New York City Opera, belt out self-referential, tongue-in-cheek lyrics that contain the kind of language not usually heard at opera houses around the world, highlighted by F-bombs galore and a host of naughty nicknames for breasts. The story skips around in often confusing ways, too much time is spent on some relatively insignificant sections just for shock effect (for example, the stripper scene), and Thomas, who cowrote Jerry Springer: The Opera, never really gets inside Anna Nicole’s head, which keeps the audience at a distance. In addition, Miller doesn’t quite embody Anna Nicole, and it is occasionally hard to interpret what she’s singing, forcing the audience to read the surtitles, which is not necessary for all the vocalists. The standout performers are Bickley and tenor Brubaker, who is a hoot, especially in his glam outfit. This coproduction with BAM continues at the Howard Gilman Opera House through September 28; it would indeed be a shame if this were New York City Opera’s swan song, as they are willing to take on challenges that other companies wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot (stripper?) pole. (You can contribute to keep their 2013-14 season alive here.)

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary MANAKAMANA

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, September 28, 1:30
Howard Gilman Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Monday, September 30, 3:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.manakamanafilm.com

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer. A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening September 28 and 30 in the Motion Portraits section of the fifty-first New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

MUSEUM DAY LIVE! 2013

Multiple venues
Saturday, September 28
Admission: free for two people with printed ticket
www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday

The ninth annual free museum day, sponsored by Smithsonian magazine, takes place on Saturday, September 28, with institutions all over the country opening their doors to people who have downloaded a free ticket for two from the above website. There’s only one ticket allowed per household/e-mail address, so be careful before filling out the online form; some of the museums are free anyway, either all the time or on Saturdays, while others might be between exhibits so there won’t be all that much to see. The participating venues in the five boroughs include the Asia Society Museum (“Iran Modern”), the Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (“Dog Bless You: The Photography of Mary Bloom”), the Children’s Museum of Manhattan (“Red Grooms’ New York City”), El Museo del Barrio (“La Bienal: Here Is Where We Jump!”), the Fraunces Tavern Museum (“Rating the Attic: A Crowdsourced Exhibit”), the Hispanic Society, Historic Richmond Town, the Jewish Museum (“Chagall: Love, War, and Exile”), the Morgan Library (“Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings”), the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden, the Museum of American Finance (“The Fed at 100”), the Museum of Arts & Design (“Body & Soul: New International Ceramics”), the Museum of Chinese in America (“Shanghai Glamour: New Women 1910s-40s”), the New York City Fire Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection (“Tides of 100 Years”), the Rubin Museum of Art (“Flip Side”), the Skyscraper Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (“Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes”), the Staten Island Museum (“They’re Baaack! Return of the Seventeen-Year Cicadas”), the Ukrainian Museum (“Out of Tradition: Contemporary Decorative and Applied Art”), the U.S. Lighthouse Tender LILAC (“Industrial Waters”), the Van Cortlandt House Museum, the Vilcek Foundation (“Brian Doan: hôme hôme home”), and the Waterfront Museum (“Pollywogs and Shellbacks: Marine Paintings by Frank Hanavan”). Of course, if you pair up with friends and relatives, you can get more tickets for different places.

THE DAN BAND

The Dan Band continue their residency at Stage 48 on September 27 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Stage 48
605 West 48th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Friday, September 27, $26, 8:00
Residency continues October 26 and December 12
www.thedanband.com
www.stage48.com
the dan band slideshow

Actor and comedian Dan Finnerty has carved out quite a niche for himself. Finnerty, who has appeared in such stage productions as Hair and Stomp, has spent the last decade heading the Dan Band, an outrageously funny group that specializes in covers of songs originally performed by women. On August 15 the Dan Band, who made a name for themselves by appearing in a trio of Todd Phillips movies, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, and The Hangover, began a four-show, four-month residency at Stage 48 on the Far West Side. Backed by a live band, Finnerty, wearing a mechanic’s outfit and a backward-facing baseball cap, and his two nerdy cohorts, Gene Reed and John Kozeluh, glided their way through such gems as ABBA’s “Fernando,” Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell,” Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle,” Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl,” Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” Irene Cara’s “Flashdance (What a Feeling)” and “Fame,” and the pièce de résistance, Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” complete with non-radio-friendly bonus lyrics. They closed with their cult hit, “Candy Shop,” a raunchy original in which Finnerty sings, “You be a nympho / I’ll be a nympho / Got the magic stick / I’m the love doctor.” Finnerty walked across every inch of the stage, joined the suited Reed and Kozeluh in some corny choreographed moments with bells, Hula hoops, and other objects, and wandered into the audience numerous times, establishing a funny rapport with some of the fans up front. Finnerty, who has been married to actress and comedian Kathy Najimy since 1995, is in the process of recording the band’s third album, following 2005’s all-covers The Dan Band Live! and 2007’s all-original Ho: A Dan Band Christmas, featuring such key tracks as “I Wanna Rock U Hard This Xmas,” “Get Drunk & Make Out This Christmas,” and, of course, “Ho Ho Ho.” Though seemingly a one-trick pony, the Dan Band has so far avoided becoming overly gimmicky, as the shtick still works; they put on one damn entertaining show. The Dan Band will be back at Stage 48 on September 27, October 26, and December 12, so if you’re looking for some stupid fun, then this is the place to be.