this week in film and television

MUSEUM TOWN

Laurie Anderson entertains art lovers at MASS MoCA in Museum Town

MUSEUM TOWN (Jennifer Trainer, 2020)
BAM Film
Opens virtually Friday, December 18, $12
www.museumtownmovie.com
www.bam.org

Back in August, desperate to get out of New York City and see some art amid the pandemic lockdown, my wife and I headed north to the Berkshires to MASS MoCA and the Clark Institute, two museums that had reopened with timed tickets, limited capacity, mask wearing, and social distancing. It was my second visit to MASS MoCA and my wife’s first to the extraordinary institution, whose complicated story is told in Jennifer Trainer’s debut documentary, Museum Town, which releases virtually through BAM on December 18. (You can read about our trip here.)

After watching the film, you’ll be ready to head north as well, even though New York museums are now open. As it says on one of Jenny Holzer’s marble benches at MASS MoCA, “Words tend to be inadequate.” You have to see it to believe it.

Trainer notes her unique relationship with the museum at the start: “In 1986, I moved from Manhattan to the Berkshires as a freelance journalist. I soon caught wind of a preposterous idea to turn an old factory into the world’s largest museum of contemporary art and broke the story for the New York Times. Then I signed on to help. Building MASS MoCA from the ground up consumed the next twenty-eight years of my life. . . . I’ve moved on from the museum, but I knew I had to finish writing the story I’d started nearly three decades ago. It was simply too big, too beautiful, too improbable to leave untold.”

Trainer and cowriters Noah Bashevkin and Pola Rapaport reveal it’s all those things and more, going back to the sprawling location’s beginnings as Arnold Print Works, which operated from 1860 to 1942, then as the Sprague Electric Company from 1942 to 1985, whose sudden and unexpected closure decimated the town. But then Thomas Krens, the former director of the Williams College Museum of Art, had the idea of turning the industrial complex into a contemporary art museum, and Williams graduate Joseph C. Thompson joined him in what the latter called “a radical rethinking of what a museum could be.” (Krens and Thompson became founding directors of MASS MoCA, a position Thompson held for thirty-three years.) That astonishing idea sparked ongoing economic and political battles over the value of such an institution for the town of North Adams, which was not a bastion of modern-art lovers. “It was hell on earth to get open,” Thompson remembers.

The residents of the struggling working-class town were not exactly keen on the plan. “People in North Adams are not ready for this,” recalled museum volunteer Ruth Yarter, who had been working at Sprague since 1943, while she was still in high school. Amid the location’s fascinating history, some of which is narrated by Meryl Streep, Trainer focuses in on some of the remarkable art that has been installed in large warehouse spaces, in nooks and crevices, and in gravity-defying outdoor spaces, including Primary Separation, a sculpture by Don Gummer, Streep’s husband.

“MASS MoCA isn’t so concerned about the art world and the museum world. What it really wants to do is make art happen,” curator Denise Markonish says, and much of it is art that can’t happen anywhere else; MASS MoCA thrives on allowing artists to take risks. Trainer shows temporary and long-term installations by Louise Bourgeois, Laurie Anderson, Sol LeWitt, Spencer Finch, Franz West, Joseph Beuys, Michael Oatman, and others — seeing James Turrell testing out his immersive Into the Light room is a special treat — and doesn’t shy away from the controversy surrounding Christoph Büchel’s Training Ground for Democracy, a fierce court fight about creative control over the unfinished work.

Nick Cave surveys the future home of his massive installation “Until” in Museum Town

Interspersed throughout the documentary is an irresistible behind-the-scenes look at the installation of American multidisciplinary artist Nick Cave’s 2016-17 “Until,” a vast, fantastical landscape of found objects, chandeliers, crystals, lawn jockeys, and myriad other items that address racism, gun violence, police brutality, and gender issues; the name of the exhibition comes from the phrase “innocent until proven guilty.” (You can see my photos here.)

“This is just this place of imagination and dreaming,” Cave says as he works with a large staff from the museum, including director of fabrication and art installation Richard Criddle and fabricator Megan Tamas, to make the seemingly impossible come to life, revealing that collaboration is an art form itself.

MASS MoCA also hosts live events in its unusual spaces, so Trainer has filled the documentary with an impressive soundtrack featuring songs by Bill Callahan, Wilco, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, David Byrne (whose exhibition “Desire” ran at the museum in 1996), Ruthie Foster, the War on Drugs, Lucius, and others in addition to an original score by John Stirratt and Paul Pilot.

“How the hell did it happen?” architect Simeon Bruner asks at the beginning of the film. Thanks to Trainer, now we know.

THE LAST SERMON

Jack Baxter plays the harmonica for a child at the Presevo Refugee Camp in Serbia in The Last Sermon

THE LAST SERMON (Jack Baxter & Joshua Faudem, 2019)
Opens in theaters, VOD, and virtually December 15
www.thelastsermonmovie.com

“There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, or of a non-Arab over an Arab, or of a white over a Black, or a Black over a white except by righteousness and piety,” Jack Baxter says from his hospital bed at the beginning of the deeply personal documentary The Last Sermon, quoting from the Prophet Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon delivered in March 632. “That’s the essence of Islam . . . Not murder.”

It was a long road to The Last Sermon for Baxter and his codirector, Joshua Faudem. In September 1993, Baxter was trying to interview Louis Farrakhan for what would become his controversial documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X when he was introduced to the prophet’s Last Sermon by an Arab man. A decade later, in April 2003, Baxter went to Israel to make a documentary about accused Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, only to find out that someone else was already doing that. While taking a walk along the beach the night before he was going to go back to the States, he heard blues music coming from a bar and discovered Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv nightclub, next to the US Embassy, where people of all races, religions, and ethnicities gathered to drink, speak in English, and listen to live blues.

Baxter teamed up with Faudem and began shooting a documentary about the club when the narrative drastically changed: On April 30, 2003, two radicalized British nationals who had entered Israel through the Gaza Strip went to Mike’s Place on a suicide bombing mission, killing Ran Baron, Dominique Caroline Hass (who they had interviewed for the film), and Yanai Weiss in the bar and seriously wounding Baxter, leaving him partially paralyzed and with “organic shrapnel” in him — tiny bits of one of the bombers. Their 2004 documentary, Blues by the Beach, ended up being very different from its original intention.

In 2015, Baxter and Faudem published the graphic novel Mike’s Place: A True Story of Love, Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv. And then, in 2016, they set out to make a film about the refugee crisis in Europe but decided to also try to meet the families, now living in England, of the two suicide bombers. The Last Sermon follows Baxter, who grew up Irish Catholic in the Bronx and likes to play the harmonica, and Faudem, a former Israeli checkpoint guard, as they travel to Macedonia, Serbia, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Paris, and London, visiting refugee camps, mosques, and other locations, speaking with politicians, religious leaders, journalists, musicians, scholars, fashion designers on a photo shoot, a graffiti artist, and an anti-refugee singer-songwriter, as they try to track down the suicide bombers’ families with the help of an investigator.

Baxter notes that documentarians are not supposed to be part of the story, but he explains early on that he is breaking that rule. He admits he’s not clear about what he is seeking and hasn’t planned what he will say to the families if they agree to meet with him. Cinematographer Avi Levi, who served in the Israeli army with Faudem, often focuses on Baxter deep in thought, reflecting on what he’s seeing and what he’s remembering, as his purpose grows stronger the closer he gets to his goal. Baxter, who sports impressive curly white locks, might be a peacenik — he is most often seen wearing a black T-shirt with the English word “Peace” on it, with the Hebrew above and the Arabic below — but he turns ever-more-ornery after all that he has witnessed on the way to London.

One of the most moving interactions is at the Grand Mosque of Paris with radicalization consultant Mohammed Chirani, who works with arrested terrorists. “Religion is the pretext,” he says. “There’s the ideology and there’s the religion. If ideology wants to gain power, it clothes itself with religion, with the sacred, and says, ‘Everything you’re doing, if you murder, or if you commit terrorist attacks, it’s a jihad, an honorable action. You do it in the name of G-d so you can go to paradise.’ So it’s a perversion. They need to deconstruct to separate ideology from religion and act on their spirituality.”

Jack Baxter and Joshua Faudem stand near the Hungary border fence in The Last Sermon

Baxter doesn’t believe that the terrorists can, or should, be saved, that they are blatant murderers who cannot be reformed. Chriani responds, “For me, radicalization is a combination of ideology, which is the manipulation of religion, due to a breach inside the individual, a failure of meaning and identity. Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? . . . They have a right to redemption.” Baxter is not so sure. It’s the turning point of the documentary, as Baxter starts getting visibly angrier the rest of the way. “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? . . . They have a right to redemption” are, of course, also the questions Baxter must answer for himself.

Winner of the Best Documentary Feature and the Truth Seeker Award at the 2020 Queens World Film Festival, The Last Sermon is an intimately powerful, beautifully photographed exploration of radicalization, bigotry, hate, PTSD, and humankind’s basic desire for peace but intrinsic propensity to fight. It takes us inside one man’s very personal journey, baring his raw, exposed emotions as he tries to find resolutions that might never be able to satisfy the gaping void in his life, something we can all understand. It’s often painful to watch, but it’s also necessary, especially in these dark times. Shalom. Peace. سلام.

THROUGH THE NIGHT

The extraordinary Deloris “Nunu” Hogan and her daycare center are profiled in intimate documentary Through the Night

THROUGH THE NIGHT (Loira Limbal, 2020)
maysles documentary center virtual cinema
December 11-24, $10
www.maysles.org
www.throughthenightfilm.com

The pandemic has revealed one of the most complicated issues at the heart of American family and economic life: the problem of safe, affordable child care, especially for single and working-class mothers. Loira Limbal’s intimate and heartfelt documentary, Through the Night, shares the moving story of Deloris “Nunu” Hogan and Patrick “Pop Pop” Hogan, who have run Dee’s Tots daycare out of their New Rochelle home since 1985. The film, which was shot prior to the coronavirus crisis, focuses on Nunu and PopPop in addition to two women whose children they care for, Marisol Valencia, who is struggling to make ends meet even with three jobs, and pediatric ER nurse Shanona Tate, both of whom often work overnight shifts. The Hogans operate their “day” care twenty-four/seven and never seem to take a break; they have two young children of their own as well.

“It’s not just a job. This is really our life,” NuNu says. “My children, ever since they were the age of two years old, they had to share me with other children. I remember my children saying, ‘Mommy, why do they have to come first?’ Sometimes my children didn’t get what I had to give to the other kids.”

What NuNu gives to these other kids is love and affection; to their parents, she gives them a much-needed lifeline: the ability to hold a job. Dee’s Tots is like one big extended family; there’s a lot of laughing and a lot of crying, and the Hogans make personal sacrifices: Not only are they worried about their own children, but they limit the time they see each other, sleeping at different times so there’s always someone watching the kids.

The film also reveals a problem at the heart of working-class poverty and the American economy without hammering at it: The mothers of the children the Hogans take care of are primarily women of color who work what would be deemed essential jobs even before Covid-19 and who don’t have the option of corporate or expensive independent daycare. They are barely making enough money to keep their children at Dee’s, which has also felt the impact of the lockdown. In July 2020, Awesome without Borders, which awards grants to initiatives and projects “that increase representation and inclusion in age, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and/or ability,” gave a grant to Dee’s, explaining that “the Hogans are frontline heroes in their own right. They make it possible for essential workers to leave their children in good hands and do essential work.” Meanwhile, NuNu notes on the film’s official website, “We are staying open until they shut us down because our parents need us. It is a little bit scary because every person who walks in could bring in Covid-19.”

Afro-Dominican director and DJ Limbal (Estilo Hip Hop, #APartyCalledRosiePerez), a single mother of two living in the Bronx who holds a full-time job, says in her director’s statement: “I was raised by an amazing cast of Black and Latinx women who performed miraculous acts of resilience, creativity, and subversion on a daily basis. Unfortunately, when I look around at our popular culture these women are rarely seen and when they do appear, they are represented in reductive ways that often amount to caricatures. My vision as a filmmaker is to flood our popular culture with beautifully complex portrayals of the lives of working-class women of color so that we have new gazes and new ways of seeing ourselves.”

Limbal filmed at Dee’s from 2016 to 2018, showing Nunu and/or PopPop making arts and crafts with the kids, flipping through a family album, marching in a parade, preparing children for overnight stays, dancing at a party, teaching gardening, and playfully auctioning off goodies. It is a love story not only between the Hogans and the children but between the Hogans themselves. “We kinda feed off of each other. We need our spirits lifted up too in order to be the people that we are,” NuNu says. Through the Night, which is screening virtually December 11-24 at the maysles documentary center, will lift viewers’ spirits as well while also opening their eyes.

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

Atsuko Maeda is mesmerizing as a young woman trying to find her place in the world in To the Ends of the Earth

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019)
Metrograph Digital
December 11-17, $12
metrograph.com
www.kimstim.com

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth is a gorgeously photographed, hauntingly meditative treatise on finding one’s place in the world. In her third film with Kurosawa following Seventh Code and Before We Vanish, former J-pop idol Atsuko Maeda of AKB48 fame is transcendent as Yoko, the host of a global travel show. She is making her way through Uzbekistan with her small crew — director Yoshioka (Shota Sometani), cameraman Iwao (Ryo Kase), production assistant Sasaki (Tokio Emoto), and translator Temur (Adiz Rajabov) — but the peppiness and determination she displays when being filmed is not repeated in real life, where she is quiet, lonely, and somber.

They head from Samarkand to Tashkent to Zaamin, from old cities to modern urban centers to the mountains and the sea, seeking out unusual and compelling stories, but not much is going well. At Lake Aydar on the hunt for the elusive bramul fish, a local fisherman refuses going out on the water with a woman. At an amusement park, a ride operator does not think she is strong enough to handle a fierce topsy-turvy spin. And a woman at a chaykhana won’t make her a proper plate of plov. But she soldiers on, doing whatever is necessary for the sake of the show, but it’s clear that her heart is no longer in it, if it ever was.

When she comes upon a goat tethered in a small pen in a back alley, she stops and says, “If I set that goat free in some grassy place, it’d be so happy.” Then, speaking directly to the goat, she asks, “What do you want?” It’s really a question she’s asking herself. Later she tells Iwao, “I feel like I’m moving away from what I really want to do.”

She rarely hangs out with the crew when they’re not filming. She eats by herself, is constantly late, does her own makeup and chooses her own clothing, and spends evenings alone in her hotel room, texting her firefighter boyfriend, who is in Tokyo, the only time she appears to experience any sort of genuine pleasure, but even that becomes problematic later on. When she is given a handheld video camera to take on her private adventures, she soon finds herself on the run from the law. Yoko is a kind of cross between Iris (Kati Outinen) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl, though not nearly as dark and pathetic, and Giulietta Masina in any of a number of Fellini films, sweet and innocent but hiding pain. The camera adores her face, as if it’s a character unto itself.

The film is filled with memorable images: Yoko standing waist-deep in the lake, lying flat on the floor of her hotel room, hiding from the police, trekking through sandy mountains, skittering through a sketchy underpass, and wandering into the empty Navoi Theater. It was made in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan and takes place along the Silk Road. Akiko Ashizawa’s cinematography of these little-seen landscapes is captivating, each shot composed like a unique work of art. Editor Koichi Takahashi’s pacing is mesmerizing, with immersive sound by Shinji Watanabe and understated music by Yusuke Hayashi.

Kurosawa is known for such gripping thrillers as Cure and Pulse as well as the elegiac Tokyo Sonata and the romantic drama Journey to the Shore; To the Ends of the Earth, which opens December 11 at Metrograph Digital, takes him to another level, highlighted by an unforgettable performance by Maeda in a film that is about filmmaking, about telling stories and acting them out in a fictitious world where, as in reality, life doesn’t always follow the script.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Jefferson Mays portrays more than fifty characters in A Christmas Carol (photo by Chris Whitaker)

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
Twenty-four-hour stream through January 3, $50 ($30 with code SCROOGE through 12/12)
Daily lottery: $15 (10 random winners)
www.achristmascarollive.com

Jefferson Mays’s mostly one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is the best filmed theatrical production made during the pandemic that I have seen. It is also the best one I’ve heard. Tony winner Mays may be the star of the holiday tale, spectacularly portraying more than fifty characters in ninety minutes, but Joshua D. Reid nearly steals the show with his stunning sound design, which works hand in hand with Ben Stanton’s pinpoint-precision lighting; headphones and as large a screen as possible are a must to fully appreciate this outstanding presentation. A big monitor and great speakers will also increase the scare level, because first and foremost, this telling is a ghost story, with genuine frights, one of which made my heart drop into my stomach.

Originally produced at the Geffen Playhouse in LA in 2018, the play, adapted by Mays and his wife, Susan Lyon, with director Michael Arden, has been reimagined by Arden and set and costume designer Dane Laffrey for online viewing. It was recorded in October at the historic United Palace theater on Broadway at 175th St., built in 1930 as a lush vaudeville and movie house that served as a church for the Rev. Ike and his ministry from 1969 to 2017. United Palace calls itself the Home of Spiritual Artistry, and that’s exactly what you’ll find in A Christmas Carol.

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge!” Mays announces early as the narrator. “A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.” The word “solitary” hits us differently during the pandemic lockdown, as we watch a single actor onstage, performing in an empty theater for an audience of one, or maybe a few more, sheltering at home.

He continues, “Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, `My dear Scrooge, how are you?’ No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even blind men’s dogs, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways. . . . But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.” At that instant, Arden cuts to a far shot of Mays, looking lonely and far away, socially distanced from the rest of humanity.

A Christmas Carol has been reimagined for online viewing during the pandemic (photo by Chris Whitaker)

Cinematographer Maceo Bishop’s camera follows Mays across the space, zooms in for extreme close-ups, and occasionally pulls back to remind us that Mays is on a stage; this Christmas Carol is a hybrid piece of film/theater, a new kind of work that is both and neither, something that is likely to last beyond Covid-19, when venues are open again for audiences to sit together in community while people around the world are craving access to the same show. At one point, when Mays is shifting between Ebenezer Scrooge and one of the ghosts, Mays not only changes his voice for each character, enhanced by Reid’s bold sound manipulation, but he merely needs to shift his shoulders from left to right to move between the roles, his face bathed in green as the ghost and in white light as the grinchy banker. It’s a terrifying scene that could not be captured in the theater for all to see, while on a movie screen it would lose its intimacy. There are also video projections, smoke and fog, and lighting effects so palpable they have an intense physicality to them.

Mays knows his way around multiple parts; his breakthrough came in 2003 in Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife, in which he portrayed the real-life Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and thirty-nine others, earning a Tony, and he played nine members of the D’Ysquith family in the Tony-winning musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. In A Christmas Carol, he plays more than fifty characters, from Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Fezziwig, and Tiny Tim to Fred, Scrooge, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. He does so in the same Victorian outfit, a white shirt under a dark suit and long coat, with a top hat. His hair, styled by Cookie Jordan, fluffs up over each ear, evoking an unbalanced Princess Leia.

Mays inhabits the roles from the very start with an easygoing grace and familiarity; when he was a child, his parents would read the story to the family every year. Two-time Tony nominee Arden (Spring Awakening, Once on This Island) began his career playing Tiny Tim in a Texas community theater production of A Christmas Carol when he was ten. The care and understanding they have for the material shines through; the only weakness is Sufjan Stevens’s treacly caroling, which feels like it was meant for a different holiday show.

A Christmas Carol streams through January 3 and is a benefit for more than fifty local theater companies and venues around the country that have been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. When two gentlemen knock at the door seeking a charity donation, Scrooge is none too happy, leading to the following exchange:

“Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

He politely gets to the point.

“What shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

“You wish to be anonymous?”

“I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry.”

This Christmas Carol should make many people merry during what will be a very challenging holiday season, with the coronavirus raging inside and outside prisons, millions out of work, so many charities and businesses in need of funds, and the desperate need to not be alone overwhelming our daily existence. Mays, Arden, et al. don’t just transport us to another plane for ninety thrilling minutes — they have given us a present that will stay with us for a long time.

PJ HARVEY: A DOG CALLED MONEY

PJ Harvey traveled to Kosovo, Kabul, and Washington, DC, to inspire 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project

A DOG CALLED MONEY (Seamus Murphy, 2019)
Film Forum online
Opens virtually Wednesday, December 9, $12 for 48-hour rental
filmforum.org

Irish photojournalist Seamus Murphy lays bare English musician PJ Harvey’s creative process in the irresistible documentary A Dog Called Money. Polly Jean Harvey initially hired Murphy to take photos for her 2011 album, Let England Shake, after having seen Murphy’s 2008 exhibit and book, A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan. Murphy ended up making twelve short films with her, one for each song on the record, and in 2012 he asked Harvey if she wanted to accompany him on his trips to Kabul, Kosovo, and Washington, DC, where they would work separately, he on a book, she on a record. But the journeys led to a creative cornucopia that also resulted in their collaborating on the book The Hollow of the Hand, featuring his photographs and her poetry, as well as the 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project and the documentary, which opens virtually December 9 at Film Forum.

Murphy follows Harvey, dressed all in black, as she goes through old photos and other detritus in a looted, destroyed home, sits on the rocky shore of a lake writing in her journal (with voice-over narration of her thoughts), hangs out with Corny’s crew in Anacostia, wanders into a theater in ruins (“I’ve heard twenty years ago, you could pay to get into the cinema with bullets,” she says), has tea with a group of children, and visits with local musicians in Kabul’s “Tin Pan Alley.” Murphy cuts between these scenes and Harvey and her band recording new songs in a specially constructed studio in the basement of the historic arts center Somerset House in London. Harvey, who burst onto the alternative music scene in the 1990s with such seminal records as Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love, turns the sessions into an art installation by allowing people to watch from behind a one-way mirror; they can see her, but she can’t see them. It’s a genuine treat to observe Harvey’s process as she works with such musicians as John Parish, Terry Edwards, Kenrick Rowe, Enrico Gabrielli, Mike Smith, Alessandro Stefana, James Johnston, Alaine Johannes, Adam “Cecil” Bartlett, Jean-Marc Butty, and Mick Harvey (no relation) on melody, vocalization, and instrumentation, the songs taking shape right before our eyes and ears.

Murphy draws direct parallels between what Harvey witnesses and the songs she is writing. She meets a woman walking with her hands behind her back, holding a chain with two keys, who says, “I would kill them with my own hands if I knew who was responsible”); in “Chain of Keys,” Harvey sings, “The woman’s old / The woman’s old and dressed in black / She keeps her hands / She keeps her hands behind her back / Imagine what / Imagine what her eyes have seen / We ask if she / We ask but she won’t let us in.” After playing with the Kabul musicians, she transforms their sounds into the powerful “Homo Sappy Blues.” She uses some of Corny’s crew’s exact words and actions in her lyrics for “A Dog Called Money.” She also captures the overall feeling of her experience in such tunes as “The Ministry of Defence” (“Those are the children’s cries from the dark / These are the words written under the arch / Scratched in the wall in biro pen / This is how the world will end”) and the stunning “I’ll Be Waiting” (“They swept across the land / They did not leave a thing / They did not leave a person / A stone or a tree / They did not leave anything / They did not leave anything / All that’s left is sand / All that’s left is sand”).

At first what seems like it could be cultural appropriation develops into something else, a genuine attempt to understand what is happening in these countries and around the world — as well as in America with the inclusion of DC — and sharing that through music. “Everyone driving in one direction / Everyone driving in every direction / Where to go? / Why? / What to say when I get there?” Harvey narrates near the start of the film, which opens with an extended close-up of a smiling boy with a dirty face, his nose pressed against the window of a car, the sound of traffic all around him. For ninety minutes, we are all that boy, and he is us. And we have a book, an album, and now a documentary to remember that.

A TOAST TO DOWNTOWN

Who: Paul Pfeiffer, Eiko Otake, Amina Henry, Morgan Bassichis, Mona Chalabi, Ivy Mix, Mariana Valencia, Jessica Lappin, Maggie Boepple
What: LMCC benefit fundraiser
Where: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council online
When: Wednesday, December 9, free with RSVP (donations accepted), 7:00
Why: Since 1973, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has “served, connected, and made space for artists and communities in NYC through programs that deepen artists’ creative practice and afford them opportunities to share their process and work with local communities.” Rarely has that been more important than during the pandemic lockdown. On December 9 at 7:00, LMCC’s annual fundraiser goes virtual with “A Toast to Downtown,” celebrating the great work the organization does not only in Lower Manhattan but on Governors Island and other locations. This year’s civic leadership honorees are Downtown Alliance president Jessica Lappin and former LMCC president Maggie Boepple; in addition, Amina Henry (The Animals, Bully) will receive the Sarah Verdone Writing Award, Eiko Otake will be presented with the Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts, and Paul Pfeiffer will receive the Michael Richards Award for Visual Arts.

The evening will include video from Pfeiffer, who will show excerpts from a new work as well as from 2001’s Orpheus Descending, which was installed at the World Trade Center and follows the life cycle of a flock of chickens; a new video from Eiko, made for this gala and recently shot on location at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island; and appearances by LMCC artists and alumni Morgan Bassichis, Mona Chalabi, Ivy Mix, and Mariana Valencia. It’s free to RSVP, but $20 gives you a chance to win a limited edition “100 New Yorkers” print by Chalabi based on her 2020 River to River project, $50 helps fund artist residencies, $100 supports grants to neighborhood arts communities, and $250 gives artists the opportunity to share their work and their creative process.