(le) poisson rouge
158 Bleecker St.
Friday, March 8, $12-$15, 7:30
www.lepoissonrouge.com
www.indigestmag.com
“The sign in the Sweet Apple kitchen declared it a nut-free zone, and every September somebody, almost always a dad, cracked the usual stupid joke,” begins “The Climber Room,” the first of thirteen stories in Sam Lipsyte’s new collection, The Fun Parts (FSG, March 5, 2013, $24). “The gag, Laura, the school director, told Tovah, would either mock the school’s concern for potentially lethal legumes or else suggest that despite the sign’s assurance, not everyone at Sweet Apple could boast of sanity.” Indeed, throughout his career, native New Yorker Lipsyte has featured many characters whose sanity could be debated, in such seriocomic books as The Subject Steve, The Ask, and Home Land. Lipsyte, who teaches creative writing at Columbia, once appeared in an infomercial for an exercise machine, is the son of sportswriter and young adult novelist Robert Lipsyte, and was the screaming frontman for the punk band Dungbeetle, takes a razor-sharp, cynical, and very funny knife to the foibles of modern-day America in his always entertaining writing. The bounds of sanity will be tested at (le) poisson rouge on March 8 at the official launch of The Fun Parts, which should consist of many fun parts itself as Lipsyte is joined by former New York Press columnist Mike Doughty, leader of the 1990s band Soul Coughing and author of the rock-and-roll memoir The Book of Drugs. Doughty will perform a live set, then sit down for a conversation with Lipsyte moderated by humorist Dave Hill, author of Tasteful Nudes . . . and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation. Clearly, when you put these three men together, just about anything can happen, and probably will.
Vienna-born Amos Vogel was one of the all-time-great film programmers, running Cinema 16 from 1947 into the 1960s, where he screened alternative, avant-garde, foreign-language, scientific, and other controversial works that had never before been seen in America. In the documentary Film as a Subversive Art, named after Vogel’s seminal 1974 book on experimental film, director Paul Cronin follows him as he walks around the Village, stopping by familiar places where his career began. Vogel also opens up his home and office to the camera for a fascinating look into his unique world. A radical leftist, he eagerly fought censorship to bring new ideas to adventurous moviegoers. All the while he was involved in a wonderful love story with his wife of more than sixty years, Marcia. Vogel, who died last April at the age of ninety-one — and should have been included in the Oscar segments devoted to those film people who passed away in 2012 — also was the founder and first director of the New York Film Festival. Oh, he was also the professor who got me into the NYU Cinema Studies graduate school program, so I might be somewhat biased — and probably wouldn’t even be writing this without him, something I reminded him of every time I would see him at the New York Film Festival. But judging from the people who showed up when this film was screened at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival, including filmmakers, teachers, and other programmers, I’m not the only one who realized Vogel’s importance to cinema and New York City. The film is screening March 7 at 9:00 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “A Tribute to Amos Vogel and Film as a Subversive Art,” celebrating his lasting impact on the world of film. At the beginning of the book, Vogel writes, “This is a book about the subversion of existing values, institutions, mores, and taboos — East and West, Left and Right — by the potentially most powerful art of the century. It is a book that trafficks in scepticism towards all received wisdom (including its own), towards eternal truths, rules of art, ‘natural’ and man-made laws, indeed whatever may be considered holy. It is an attempt to preserve for a fleeting moment in time — the life of this book — the works and achievements of the subversives of film.” Vogel has preserved these moments a whole lot longer than that. The film will be preceded by Andre St. Laurent’s 1963 documentary Camera Three: New York Film Festival 1963, a half-hour look into the founding of the New York Film Festival by Vogel and Richard Roud, featuring such directors as Adolfas Mekas and Joseph Losey.
Based on the novel by Keith Waterhouse (which he also adapted into a play with Willis Hall and which later became a musical), John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar is a prime example of the British New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s, which features work by such directors as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Karel Reisz. Tom Courtenay stars as William Fisher, a ne’er-do-well ladies’ man who drudges away in a funeral home and dates (and lies to) multiple women, all the while daydreaming of being the president of the fictional country of Ambrosia. Billy lives in his own fantasy world where he can suddenly fire machine guns at people who bother him and be cheered by adoring crowds as he leads a marching band. Reminiscent of the 1947 American comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which Danny Kaye dreams of other lives to lift him out of the doldrums, Billy Liar is also rooted in the reality of post-WWII England, represented by Billy’s father (Wilfred Pickles), who thinks his son is a no-good lazy bum. Shot in black-and-white, the film glows every time Julie Christie appears playing Liz, a modern woman who takes a rather fond liking to Billy. The film made Christie a star; Schlesinger next cast her in Darling, for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress. A 35mm print of Billy Liar is being shown March 7 at the IFC Center in the special program “Movie Night with Michel Gondry”; the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, and The We and the I, which opens at IFC on March 8, will participate in a discussion following the screening. “John Schlesinger’s film certainly had an influence on my films, especially The Science of Sleep, just like Walter Mitty or other films intercutting layers of consciousness,” Gondry explains on the IFC website. “Only Billy Liar is one of the few to achieve that in the context of a social satire. All Billy’s visions are like explosions coming out of this very crude and bleak reality. And his personality is very unique, nailed in his lack of ambition. This is one of the films that taught me how magic can come just from editing.”
