this week in (live)streaming

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Alicia Jo Rabins offers a public kaddish for Bernie Madoff in new film

THIRTY-FIRST ANNUAL NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
January 12-25, $12 virtual (all-access $85), $15 in person (all-access $95)
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The 2022 New York Jewish Film festival goes hybrid this year, with more than two dozen shorts and features exploring Jewish art, history, culture, and politics around the world. Running January 12-25 both at the Walter Reade Theater and online, the thirty-first annual event, a collaboration between Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, includes in-person introductions and Q&As for many screenings. The opening-night selection is Mano Khalil’s autobiographical Neighbours, about a six-year old Kurdish boy enamored with the last Jewish family in his village as nationalism and anti-Semitism rise up. The centerpiece is Kaveh Nabatian’s Sin La Habana, dealing with cross-cultural relationships in Cuba. And Aurélie Saada’s Rose closes things out, a tale about a suddenly widowed woman, played by French legend Françoise Fabian, who has to reevaluate her future as she approaches her eightieth birthday.

In addition, there will be a special tribute to film scholar, author, archivist, educator, activist, filmmaker, and independent distributor Pearl Bowser, with virtual screenings of Lloyd Reckord’s 1963 short Ten Bob in Winter and Oscar Micheaux’s 1925 classic, Body and Soul, along with a ten-minute November 2021 interview with Bowser at the Jewish Museum reflecting on the 1970 exhibition she curated there, “The Black Film.”

A KADDISH FOR BERNIE MADOFF (Alicia J. Rose, 2021)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
Monday, January 17, 1:00 & 7:00
www.filmlinc.org
www.akaddishforberniemadoff.com

I kicked myself when I missed Alicia Jo Rabins’s one-woman show, A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, when it debuted at Joe’s Pub in 2012. I had seen her play with the klezmer band Golem and had wanted to see the song cycle live. She released the album in 2014, but now she has collaborated with director and photographer Alicia J. Rose on a delightful, kooky film version, playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 17 at 1:00 and 7:00, with Rose, Rabins, and producer Lara Cuddy at the Walter Reade Theater for postscreening Q&As.

Rose follows Rabins as she becomes endlessly fascinated with the story of Bernie Madoff, the financier who built an elaborate Ponzi scheme over forty years, bilking nearly five thousand clients out of billions of dollars. Rabins, in the midst of an arts residency in a Financial District office tower while earning money by teaching bat mitzvah girls how to chant from the Torah, spoke with numerous people impacted by Madoff’s fraud, from a credit risk officer (her mother’s college roommate), a whistleblower, and an FBI agent to a therapist, a lawyer, and a Buddhist monk.

“I wasn’t just obsessed with Bernie Madoff; I was obsessed with anyone who had a connection to him, and they kept coming, one after the other,” Rabins says in the film. “I interviewed them, went back to my studio, and turned their stories into songs. I was being sucked deeper and deeper into my obsession.”

Each song is its own set piece in a different space, with Rabins dressing up like the person (her wigs are particularly fun while evoking the work of Cindy Sherman) and detailing how they were affected by Madoff’s scheme in such pop tunes as “Due Diligence,” “No Such Thing as a Straight Line,” “Down on the Seventeenth Floor,” “My Grandfather Deserted the Czar’s Army,” and “What Was the Pathology There?” She is occasionally joined by members of her band (drummer David Freeman, cellist Jennifer Kersgaard), meets a couple of yentas by a Palm Beach pool (Robin McAlpine and Judy Silk), participates in synchronized swimming, and considers holding a ritual excommunication. “I hated thinking about Madoff as a Jew. I mean, he’s pretty much the definition of bad for the Jews,” she opines. She’s not the only one to feel that way.

A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff is a great fit for the festival because it is not only about Judaism but also about New York City, shot on location in and around Wall Street, the Lipstick Building in Midtown, the Williamsburg Bridge, and other familiar spots. There is cool animation by Zak Margolis and several Golem songs in the background as Rabins relates her life and art to Madoff’s legacy, incorporating what she refers to as a kabbalistic interconnectedness and a “messianic idea of perfection.” She questions the entire financial system as she explains, “Very few people knew he was just making shit up.” And she admits that “confronting Bernie was confronting myself.” You’re bound to connect with this film in more ways than you might think.

SHORT FILMS ON CREATIVITY: UNTITLED (TANIA PROJECT) (Rima Yamazaki, 2020)
Available virtually January 20-25
www.filmlinc.org
rimayamazaki.com

In the fall of 2017, filmmaker Rima Yamazaki was invited by Ranger Mills, the widower of the late artist Tania Milicevic, to explore her legacy. Yamazaki, who has made previous films about still-life painter Ellen Altfest, on-site painter Rackstraw Downes, photographer James Casebere, and multimedia icon Joan Jonas, had never heard of Tania, but she took on the project, doing a deep dive into her work, which included painting, sculpture, collage, and public installations.

Yamazaki went through Tania’s letters, official documents, press clippings, family photographs, exhibition brochures, and personal writings to form a compelling portrait of the little-known artist, whose large-scale murals can still be seen at the corner of Mercer and Third St. in Manhattan (from 1970) and at 10 Evergreen Ave. in Brooklyn (1967), in addition to a Torah ark she designed for Tribeca Synagogue (1967). Tania was also an early feminist with intriguing statements about life and art — she favored geometric abstract patterns in multiple colors — that Yamazaki types out on the screen.

“I had four husbands . . . but I don’t think I’ve ever been married,” Tania, who was born Tatiana Lewin in Łódź, Poland, in 1920, wrote. “I want to escape gravity and the surfaces that prevent us from feeling our weight — Can we understand what we cannot feel?” she jotted down. And: “I never know what the art world is talking about. . . . I hope they do.”

Yamazaki visits the sites of Tania’s work while also going through her old studio. She uses split-screens to show photos of Tania’s oeuvre, including slides taken by Joel-Peter Witkin, known for his depictions of corpses and grotesque figures. We learn about the Construction Process Environment that Tania and Nasson Daphnis were commissioned to design in 1971 at 1500 Broadway in Times Square as well as her plans for city rooftops, which was left unfinished after her death from cancer in 1982. Yet we never see or hear Tania speak, or see others talk about her. It’s an intensely personal journey for Yamazaki, who shares only select tidbits.

The twenty-five-minute documentary will be available virtually January 20-25 as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival program “Short Films on Creativity,” which also includes Cynthia Madansky’s AA (about poet and photographer Anna Alchuk), Yoav Potash’s Beregovsky #136 (about folklorist Moshe Beregovsky), Asali Echols’s The Violin Upstairs (about the filmmaker’s violin), Eli Zuzovsky’s Mazel Tov (about Adam Weizmann’s wartime bar mitzvah), and Adrienne Gruben’s Lily (about comic-book artist Lily Reneé).

NEW YORK: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY WITH RIC BURNS AND JAMES SANDERS

Who: Ric Burns, James Sanders
What: An Evening with Ric Burns and James Sanders
Where: National Arts Club Zoom
When: Friday, January 14, free with advance RSVP, 8:00
Why: This past November, documentarian Ric Burns and architect, author, and filmmaker James Sanders released a revised and expanded version of their 1999 book, New York: An Illustrated History (Knopf, $75), a companion volume to PBS’s eight-part, seventeen-hour TV series that ran from 1999 to 2003. On January 14 at 8:00, Burns and Sanders will discuss the third edition of the book in a free, livestreamed National Arts Club discussion over Zoom.

“Especially in the past year — a defining crossroads in the life of the city and the planet — the eyes of much of the world have turned to New York City, which has found itself, yet again, at the epicenter and leading edge of increasingly momentous global experiences,” they write in the new preface. “In the coming years, as the world emerges from the worst of the pandemic, and New Yorkers themselves try to comprehend what has happened to their city and their lives, the example of New York — its history, its perspective, its setbacks, and perhaps above all its capacity for innovation, resilience, and adaptation — will be looked to as a kind of vanguard in which, in many ways, the lineaments of the future of all cities may be discerned.” The third edition goes up to the present day, with two new chapters, 128 new illustrations, and contributions from Adam Gopnik, Suketu Mehta, and Ester Fuchs, in conjunction with new episodes of the series.

WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP AND DIALOGUES PODCAST

WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP
January 12, 19, 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Exhibition continues through February 21 at MoMA
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium
www.moma.org

“It has been said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but what about the people the master treated as tools?” Adam Pendleton writes in his 2017 Black Dada Reader. “That is, the ‘tools’ that were themselves capable of practicing abstraction, those three-fifths? Before the question about tools can be asked, there must already be an understanding about what a tool is and what it is not. . . . One day there are masters and tools, and the next, only people.”

Pendleton’s multimedia installation, Who Is Queen?, on view in MoMA’s Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium through February 21, is a unique neighborhood built of various tools, where visitors walk in the middle of three five-story black scaffold towers made of timber, laden with paintings, drawings, text, graffiti-style screenprints, speakers, and a large screen that shows new and archival footage involving the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia (the city where Pendleton was born in 1984); Resurrection City, a forty-two-day encampment protest on the National Mall in 1968 that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign for civil rights; and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, a film about author, professor, and gender theorist Jack Halberstam, the latest in a series by Pendleton that follows works about Kyle Abraham, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, and Yvonne Rainer. Among the text that can be made out on the canvases are such phrases as “But now I am,” “We are not,” “Everything,” and “They will love us all,” accompanied by a sound collage that includes American violinist Hahn Rowe’s “Yellow Smile,” a poem read by Amiri Baraka, excerpts from the 2014 Ferguson solidarity protest in New York City, and music by Jace Clayton, Julius Eastman, Laura Rivers, Frederic Rzewski, Linda and Sonny Sharrock, and Hildegard Westerkamp.

Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? includes sculpture, painting, film, drawing, sound, and text (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The scaffolding resembles fire escape ladders with platforms, but the public is not permitted to walk up and get closer to some of the pieces, which can reach sixty feet high. You might also have trouble making out all the words on the lower works as a parade of museumgoers pose in front of them foor pictures without even reading what they say about politics, race, inequality, gender, and the social contract. Pendleton has previously explored those concepts in such exhibitions as “what a day was this” at Lever House, detailing his manifesto, and his lobby piece As Heavy as Sculpture welcoming visitors to the New Museum’s instantly seminal “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” show.

Adam Pendleton uses black-and-white text and imagery in multimedia MoMA installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro-pessimism,” Pendleton explained in a statement. “It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.” The articulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which has been ten years in the making, expands with a series of livestreamed Zoom reading groups and recorded podcast dialogues that are all free; snippets of the conversations will be added to the overall sound collage in the atrium.

Wednesday, January 12, 6:00
Reading Group with Harmony Holiday and Jasmine Sanders, inspired by Adam Pendleton’s idea of “poetic research” and focusing on Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and an interview between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida, “The Other’s Language”

Wednesday, January 19, 6:00
Reading Group with Che Gossett and Jules Gill-Peterson, focusing on a 2011 interview between cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and political philosopher Michael Hardt, “No One Is Sovereign in Love”

Tuesday, January 25, 6:00
Reading Group with Jace Clayton and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, focusing on “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” by James A. Snead

Adam Pendleton installation reaches sixty feet high in MoMA atrium (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Dialogues Podcast:

Episode One
Wild: A Conversation with Jack Halberstam and Lynne Tillman

Episode Two
We: A Conversation with Michael Hardt and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Episode Three
Souls: A Conversation with Simone White and Ruby Sales

Episode Four
Heard: A Conversation with Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

FIAF TALKS: DREAMING OF DIOR

Special FIAF program looks at new book and exhibition about Christian Dior

Who: Marie-France Pochna, Matthew Yokobosky
What: Discussion about new book and art exhibition on Christian Dior
Where: FIAF Skyroom and online, 22 East 60th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
When: Thursday, January 13, online or in person, $25, 7:00
Why: “Women have instinctively understood that I dream of making them not only more beautiful but also happier,” fashion revolutionary Christian Dior once said. If you didn’t get tickets for the special scent tour the Brooklyn Museum is hosting on January 19 in conjunction with its exhibition “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams,” you can still get a behind-the-scenes taste of the popular show with the January 13 FIAF Talk between Marie-France Pochna and Matthew Yokobosky, “Dreaming of Dior,” taking place in person at the French Institute Alliance Française’s Skyroom and online. Pochna is the author of the new book Christian Dior: Destiny: The Authorized Biography (Rizzoli, October 2021, $35), which includes the above quote, while Yokobosky, the senior curator of Fashion and Material Culture at the museum, collaborated with Denver Art Museum curator Florence Müller on the exhibit, which continues in Brooklyn through February 20. Depending on the nature of the omicron variant, the discussion will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

DORIT CHRYSLER: CALDER PLAYS THEREMIN

Dorit Chrysler uses a theremin to activate Alexander Calder’s Snow Flurry, I at MoMA (photo by Michael Tyburski)

DORIT CHRYSLER: CALDER PLAYS THEREMIN
Museum of Modern Art online
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start through January 15
www.moma.org

Berlin-based composer and sound artist Dorit Chrysler ingeniously activates MoMA’s “Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” exhibition with “Calder Plays Theremin,” a gorgeous eight-minute suite, “Written for Theremin Orchestra in Four Movements.” Invented by Russian-Soviet Leon Theremin around 1920, the theremin is an electronic instrument that creates music without touch, from being in close proximity to a moving object, usually a human hand. Chrysler, cofounder of the NY Theremin Society, set up four theremins (Moog, Hobbs, Moog Etherwave, and Claravox Centennial) to interact with two of Calder’s kinetic mobiles, the gentle 1948 Snow Flurry, I, which hangs from the ceiling in the corner of the third floor surrounded by three large-scale black sheet steel works, including 1959’s Black Widow, and the significantly heavier 1945 Man-Eater with Pennants, which sits in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, across the street from Theremin’s 1930s studio. Chrysler also incorporates a Moog Model 15 analog synthesizer to pay tribute to the first concert to use that instrument, performed in 1969 by Robert Moog in the sculpture garden.

Working with effects producer Rachael Guma, sonic consultant Joe McGinty, filming director Michael Tyburski, cinematographer Eric Teti, and sound recordist Daniel Neumann, Chrysler collected audio from the movement of the sculptures, whether from the blowing of the wind outdoors or a hair dryer inside. The final composition consists of four sections, “Embrace,” “Fractals,” “Brute,” and “Mesmerism,” that form a narrative as the sculptures and the theremins meet each other, engage in a dialogue, and face conflict, leading to a finale in which the other Calder sculptures become spectators.

“Alexander Calder himself really spawned the idea,” Chrysler tells associate curator Cara Manes in a MoMA interview. “When I was first invited by the Calder Foundation to visit their New York offices, I found myself surrounded by many of the artist’s large-scale works. Calder’s mobiles have strong character and personality and I envisioned them instantly as active performers. The technology of theremins allows for sound production through moving objects, so it made sense to me having a moving mobile play a theremin. The potential of the intricate movements of some of Calder’s sculptures translated into microtonal sounds seemed very exciting. Placing a theremin instrument within its calibrated range close enough to moving elements of Calder’s sculpture should make this possible. What would happen? What would it sound like? It felt like this exploration of a musical dialogue between two modernist masters of sculpture and music, through their creations, demanded to be heard.”

“Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” continues through January 15, featuring approximately seventy works from throughout the career of MoMA’s unofficial “house artist,” from wire sculptures and drawings to painted sculptural reliefs and jewelry, supplemented with photographs and other archival material.

TWI-NY AT TWENTY: TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY GALA CELEBRATION OF THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK

Who: Works by and/or featuring Moko Fukuyama, Joshua William Gelb, Gabrielle Hamilton, Jace, Elmore James, Jamal Josef, Katie Rose McLaughlin, Sara Mearns, Zaire Michel, Zalman Mlotek, Alicia Hall Moran, Patrick Page, Barbara Pollack, Seth David Radwell, Jamar Roberts, Tracy Sallows, Xavier F. Salomon, Janae Snyder-Stewart, Mfoniso Udofia, Anne Verhallen
What: This Week in New York twentieth anniversary celebration
Where: This Week in New York YouTube
When: Original air date: Saturday, May 22, free with RSVP, 7:00 (now available on demand)
Why: In April 2001, I found myself suddenly jobless when a relatively new Silicon Alley company that had made big promises took an unexpected hit. I took my meager two weeks’ severance pay and spent fourteen days wandering through New York City, going to museums, film festivals, parks, and tourist attractions. I compiled my experiences into an email I sent to about fifty friends, rating each of the things I had done. My sister’s husband enthusiastically demanded that I keep doing this, and This Week in New York was born.

Affectionately known as twi-ny (twhy-nee), it became a website in 2005 and soon was being read by tens of thousands of people around the globe. I covered a vast array of events – some fifteen thousand over the years – that required people to leave their homes and apartments and take advantage of everything the greatest city in the world had to offer. From the very start, I ventured into nooks and crannies to find the real New York, not just frequenting well-known venues but seeking out the weird and wild, the unusual and the strange.

For my tenth anniversary, we packed Fontana’s, a now-defunct club on the Lower East Side, and had live music, book readings, and a comics presentation. I had been considering something bigger for twenty when the pandemic lockdown hit and lasted longer than we all thought possible.

At first, I didn’t know what twi-ny’s future would be, with nowhere for anyone to go. But the arts community reacted quickly, as incredible dance, music, art, theater, opera, film, and hybrid offerings began appearing on numerous platforms; the innovation and ingenuity blew me away. The winners of twi-ny’s Pandemic Awards give you a good idea of the wide range of things I covered; you can check out part one here and part two here. (Part III is now up as well.)

I devoured everything I could, from experimental dance-theater in a closet and interactive shows over the phone and through the mail to all-star Zoom reunion readings and an immersive, multisensory play that arrived at my door in a box. Many of them dealt with the fear, isolation, and loneliness that have been so pervasive during the Covid-19 crisis while also celebrating hope, beauty, and resilience. I’ve watched, reviewed, and previewed more than a thousand events created since March 2020, viewing them from the same computer where I work at my full-time job in children’s publishing.

Just as companies are deciding the future hybrid nature of employment, the arts community is wrestling with in-person and online presentations. As the lockdown ends and performance venues open their doors, some online productions will go away, but others are likely to continue, benefiting from a reach that now goes beyond their local area and stretches across the continents.

On May 22 at 7:00, “twi-ny at twenty,” produced and edited by Michael D. Drucker of Delusions International and coproduced by Ellen Scordato, twi-ny’s business manager and muse, honors some of the best events of the past fourteen months, including dance, theater, opera, art, music, and literature, all of which can be enjoyed for free from the friendly confines of your couch. There is no registration fee, and the party will be available online for several weeks. You can find more information here.

Please let me know what you think in the live chat, which I will be hosting throughout the premiere, and be sure to say hello to other twi-ny fans and share your own favorite virtual shows.

Thanks for coming along on this unpredictable twenty-year adventure; I can’t wait to see you all online and, soon, in real life. Here’s to the next twenty!

A BOWIE CELEBRATION 2022

Who: Def Leppard, Noel Gallagher, Simon Le Bon and John Taylor, Living Colour, Evan Rachel Wood, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Walk the Moon, Jake Wesley Rogers, Ricky Gervais, Gail Ann Dorsey, Bernard Fowler, Judith Hill, Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Joe Sumner, more
What: Annual birthday party for David Bowie
Where: RollingLiveStudios.com
When: Saturday, January 8, $25, 9:00 (available through January 16)
Why: January 8, 2022, would have been David Bowie’s seventy-fifth birthday. Rolling Live Studios will again host an online celebration featuring performances and special appearances from a wide range of artists to honor the Thin White Duke, who passed away on January 10, 2016, at the age of sixty-nine. Among the participants are Def Leppard, Noel Gallagher, Simon Le Bon and John Taylor from Duran Duran, Living Colour, Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Henson, Rob Thomas, Gary Oldman, Ricky Gervais, Gail Ann Dorsey, and Bernard Fowler — who tore up the joint at last year’s party — covering tunes from throughout Bowie’s extraordinary career. There will also be a tribute to the thirty-fifth anniversary of Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s sci-fi puppet flick in which Bowie played Jareth, the king of the goblins; Bowie wrote five songs for the film: “Underground,” “Magic Dance,” “Chilly Down,” “As the World Falls Down,” and “Within You.”

The house band will include Earl Slick, Charlie Sexton, Alan Childs, Steve Elson, Mark Guiliana, Omar Hakim, Stan Harrison, Tim Lefebvre, Gerry Leonard, and Carmine Rojas. “It’s an honor to be able to continue to share David Bowie’s music with the world,” event organizer and longtime Bowie pianist Mike Garson said in a statement. “I’m excited for everyone to be able to experience this very special show we’ve got in store in celebration of what would have been David’s seventy-fifth birthday, with the bandmates he recorded and performed with, plus a great group of guest artists who he was such an influence to.” The show is dedicated to photographer Mick Rock, “the Man Who Shot the ’70s,” who died this past November in Staten Island at the age of seventy-two. Tickets are $25, with various bundles including merch and a virtual Q&A ranging from $30 to $5,000; $$2 from each purchase will benefit Save the Children, which Bowie raised money for at this fiftieth-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden on January 9, 1997.