Rayya Elias will read from her memoir and play a twenty-minute set at free Mixer series at Cake Shop on September 18 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Cake Shop
152 Ludlow St.
Wednesday, September 18, free, 7:00
212-253-0036
www.cake-shop.com
Hosts Melissa Febos and Rebecca Keith have put together another eclectic collection of writers for this month’s edition of the Mixer Reading and Music Series, taking place September 18 at 7:00 at Cake Shop. Lucy Corin will be reading from her new collection, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s, August 2013), Alina Simone will share parts of her latest novel, Note to Self (Faber & Faber, June 2013), and Rayya Elias will be delving into her debut, Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side (Viking, April 2013). In addition, Elias, who has been a hair stylist to the stars, a punk rocker, a homeless woman, a drug addict, and an incarcerated prisoner during her remarkable life, will be playing a twenty-minute set of songs that serve as the soundtrack to her book.
Art, American consumerism, the Vietnam and Algerian wars, Hollywood, and the cinema itself get skewered in Jean-Luc Godard’s fab feaux gangster flick / road comedy / romance epic / musical Pierrot Le Fou. Based on Lionel White’s novel Obsession, the film follows the chaotic exploits of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, Godard’s then-wife), former lovers who meet up again quite by accident. The bored Ferdinand immediately decides to leave his wife and family for the flirtatious, unpredictable Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot despite his protestations. Soon Ferdinand is caught in the middle of a freewheeling journey involving gun running, stolen cars, dead bodies, and half-truths, all the while not quite sure how much he can trust Marianne. Filmed in reverse-scene order without much of a script, the mostly improvised Pierrot Le Fou was shot in stunning color by Raoul Coutard. Many of Godard’s recurring themes and style appear in the movie, including jump cuts, confusing dialogue, written protests on walls, and characters speaking directly at the audience, who are more or less along for the same ride as Ferdinand. And as with many Godard films, the ending is a doozy.
While changing the face of Hollywood cinema with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, American auteur Francis Ford Coppola snuck in yet another 1970s masterpiece, the dark psychological thriller The Conversation. Gene Hackman gives a riveting performance as Harry Caul, an audio surveillance expert who has been hired to record a meeting between two people (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) in Union Square in San Francisco. Thinking that he might have stumbled onto a murder plot, Caul soon finds himself in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy that threatens the lives of all those involved. The Conversation is a gripping, taut examination of obsession, paranoia, and loneliness as well as an exploration of language and communication. Caul might spend most of his time listening in on the intimate conversations of others, but he is an intensely private individual who is extremely uncomfortable in his own skin. A deeply religious man who also plays the saxophone, Caul has trouble relating to other people; Hackman is particularly outstanding in a party scene where Caul is forced to talk shop with fellow surveillance expert Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield), who wants to know Caul’s secrets, but the always nervous Caul isn’t about to share everything. The film also examines how people hear what they want to hear and see what they want to see, and it takes on even more meaning in a twenty-first century dominated by public and private surveillance, from store security cameras and government monitoring to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The supporting cast, which also features Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Teri Garr, and John Cazale, is exceptional, but this is Hackman’s show all the way, leading to one of the great endings in the history of cinema.