“All I want to do is just play some more,” JC Brooks declares on Want More, the 2011 sophomore album from JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound. “All I want to do is just dance some more.” The Chicago indie postpunk soulsters never leaves ’em wanting more, getting their groove on in raucous live shows that feature lead singer Brooks, a dynamic front man who has also appeared in such musicals as Passing Strange and Ragtime, along with guitarist Billy Bungeroth, bassist Ben Taylor, drummer Kevin Marks, and Chris Neal and Andrew Zelm on horns. The follow-up to 2009’s Beat of Our Own Drum, the group’s second disc includes such soul-stirring tracks as “Everything Will Be Fine,” “I Got High,” “Baaadnews,” “Sister Ray Charles,” and a celebrated cover of Wilco’s “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” which got the seal of approval from Jeff Tweedy himself, who has joined JC onstage to perform the song together. “Missing things is all I ever do,” Brooks sings on the new album. It would be a shame to miss them when they play Friday night at Brooklyn Bowl on a bill with Mingo Fishtrap, DJ Jack Dutone, and the Revelations featuring Tre Williams.
this week in music
RAQUEL CION: GILDING THE LONELY
Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Saturday, August 18, $15, 9:30
212-967-7555
www.joespub.com
There’s no reason sexy chanteuse Raquel Cion should be lonely any longer. Her Gilding the Lonely is an intimate portrait of longing that deserves to be seen by many. In June, it was standing-room only for two shows at the Lounge at Dixon Place, where the native New Yorker triumphed with her engaging mix of music and tragicomic tales of looking for love in the big city. On Saturday, August 18, she’s moving slightly uptown to Joe’s Pub, where she’ll be wearing a glittering gown, performing songs by David Bowie, Prince, the Rolling Stones, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Waits, and others, accompanied by Zecca Esquibel (Get Wet) on piano and Bill Gerstel (3 Teens Kill 4) on drums. “Being lonely in NYC is different,” Cion (Cou-Cou Bijoux: Pour Vous) told us in a June twi-ny talk. “Though loneliness is universal, no one is immune. But there is something about feeling lonely in New York that has its own particular flavor. Sometimes it feels like an everlasting gobstopper in how it can change flavor and how you gotta just suck it (up).”
FILMS IN TOMPKINS: POLTERGEIST
Life is about to get a whole lot creepier for the Freeling family in POLTERGEIST
POLTERGEIST (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
Tompkins Square Park
500 East Ninth St. between Aves. A & B
Thursday, August 16, free, sundown
www.filmsintompkins2012.com
When psychic Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein) says “Don’t go into the light,” she means it in more ways than one, so be sure to take heed when Tobe Hooper’s classic modern ghost story screens for free in tree-lined Tompkins Square Park on August 16. Inspired by the 1962 Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost,” Poltergeist, which also features the significant involvement of cowriter and producer Steven Spielberg, has all the elements in all the right places to just plain scare the hell out of you. Shortly after Steven (Craig T. Nelson) and Diane (JoBeth Williams) Freeling move into their new home in the planned California community of Cuesta Verde, things start getting very creepy, especially when youngest daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) announces, “They’re here,” then disappears into the television. Meanwhile, older sister Dana (Dominique Dunne) freaks out, and brother Robbie (Oliver Robins) has a bit of a problem with a clown doll and a tree branch. Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Lifeforce) lets the tension build slowly until it eventually explodes in a no-holds-barred ending that will have you digging into the cuticles of whoever is sitting next to you. And yes, those skeletons are real human bones, not replicas. The success of Poltergeist led to two sequels, a television series, and, unfortunately, a possible remake, but there’s nothing quite like the original, a deviously delicious frightfest that continues to send shivers down the spine no matter how often one sees it. And yes, Steven’s boss is indeed played by the Pathmark man (James Karen). Sadly — some say the result of a curse — O’Rourke died in 1988 at the age of twelve, and Dunne, the daughter of writer Dominick Dunne, was murdered by a former boyfriend in 1982 when she was just twenty-two. The Tompkins Square Park screening will be preceded by live music from East Village African rock group Timbila.
OUTDOOR CINEMA 2012: CERTIFIED COPY
William Shimell and Juliette Binoche both play annoying characters you will not want to hang out with in CERTIFIED COPY
CERTIFIED COPY (COPIE CONFORME) (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Socrates Sculpture Park
Broadway at Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday, August 15, free, 7:00
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org/programs/outdoorcinema.php
www.ifcfilms.com
Writer, director, poet, photographer, editor, graphic designer, and painter Abbas Kiarostami has been one of Iran’s leading filmmakers for nearly forty years, compiling a resume that includes such important international films as Under the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Certified Copy is his first feature made outside of his home country, a dreadfully boring and annoying art-infused romantic comedy set in Italy. Juliette Binoche was named Best Actress at Cannes this year for her starring role as an unnamed single mother and antiques dealer who is obsessed with English author James Miller’s (British opera star William Shimell) book on the history and meaning of art replicas, Certified Copy. Inexplicably, the two strangers are soon on a bizarre sort-of date, driving through Tuscany and becoming involved in a series of vignettes about love and marriage, literature and art, and other topics. Both characters are seriously flawed and emotionally unstable in ways that make them unattractive to watch, especially in obvious set-ups that either go nowhere or exactly where you think they’re going. While Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke made the somewhat similar Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), in which two strangers from different countries spend a day together (but mostly by themselves), the sexual tension and excitement always building, Certified Copy is more reminiscent of Hans Canova’s ridiculous Conversations with Other Women (2005), in which Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter star as wedding guests with a past whom viewers can’t wait to just shut up and get off the screen. Don’t let the supposed adult dialogue of Certified Copy fool you into thinking it’s an intelligent, mature look at believable relationships; instead, it feels like a staid copy of other, better films you think you’ve seen but can’t remember — and won’t care. Certified Copy is screening on August 15 as part of Socrates Sculpture Park’s fourteenth annual free Outdoor Cinema summer series, with that night’s focus on France and Italy; in addition to the film, there will be live music and/or dance and local regional cuisine.
TICKET ALERT: BAM FISHER NEXT WAVE
Tickets go on sale August 13 for inaugural Next Wave season in Fishman Space at new BAM Fisher center
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
All tickets $20; on sale Monday, August 13
Season runs September 5 – December 23
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Bigger isn’t necessarily better these days as BAM gets into the low-price, small-theater game for its thirtieth Next Wave festival. Earlier this year, the Signature Theatre opened its new Pershing Square Center on West 42nd St., comprising three venues that seat between 191 and 294 people and with all ticket prices for the initial run a mere $25. Then, in May, Lincoln Center raised the curtain on its new space, the Claire Tow Theater, which resides above the Mitzi E. Newhouse and has room for 112 customers, who pay only $20 per performance. And today, $20 tickets go on sale for BAM’s new venue, BAM Fisher on Ashland Pl., which features the 250-seat Fishman Space. Focusing on short-run experimental presentations, BAM Fisher will host dance, film, music, theater, talks, and more. The inaugural season opens with Jonah Bokaer and Anthony McCall’s site-specific Eclipse, an intimate four-character dance with the audience on all four sides, and continues with such works as The Shooting Gallery, a collaboration between video artist Bill Morrison and composer Richard Einhorn; Brooklyn Bred, consisting of performance art by Coco Fusco, Dread Scott, and Jennifer Miller, curated by Martha Wilson; Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Living Word Project’s sociopolitical red, black & GREEN: a blues, which promises something for all five senses; and dance pieces by Lucy Guerin (Untrained) and Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People (And lose the name of action). Expect the phone lines to be jammed, because tickets ($28-$144) also go on sale today for a new production of Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and Lucinda Childs’s four-and-a-half-hour Einstein on the Beach at the Howard Gilman Opera House.
VIDEO OF THE DAY: “WONDER” BY ETERNAL SUMMERS
As the balmy dog days of August threaten, the calendar pays no heed to the desire for the summer to go on and on and on. But the more one listens to Correct Behavior (Kanine, July 2012), the delightful sophomore album from Eternal Summers, the more it feels like the season just might actually last forever. After having her Parker Nitefly stolen during her last tour, lead singer Nicole Yun opted to replace it with a Fender Telecaster and bassist Jonathan Woods, turning the Roanoke duo — Yun and drummer Daniel Cundiff recorded the band’s debut, 2010’s Silver, and the 2011 four-track EP Prisoner — into a trio that expands their infectious postpunk dream pop in exciting ways. Correct Behavior blasts off with a massive triple shot of ’80’s-inspired subtle power, with “Millions,” “Wonder,” and “You Kill,” before turning to the goofy and playful “I Love You,” featuring bright, summery woo-oo-woo-oo-woo-oo vocals. Cundiff talk-sings his way through the electro-grooves of “Girls in the City,” leading into the shoegazing harmonies of “Good as You.” One of the best albums of the year concludes with the appropriately titled “Summerset,” as Yun opines, “With you I’ll die.” Summer isn’t quite dead yet, especially with Endless Summers playing two shows this weekend, Saturday night at 285 Kent with Dinowalrus, Life Size Maps, and Grand Resort, then Sunday afternoon at 3:00 at the free Sound Bites series at Fulton Stall Market at the South Street Seaport.
THE PONDEROSA STOMP: SONGS OF SOULFUL ACTIVISM
Ponderosa Stomp will celebrate the legacy of Gil Scott-Heron and others at the free Roots of American Music Festival at Lincoln Center this weekend
LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS: ROOTS OF AMERICAN MUSIC FESTIVAL
Lincoln Center
Bruno Walter Auditorium, Damrosch Park Bandshell, Hearst Plaza
Saturday, August 11, and Sunday, August 12, free
www.lcoutofdoors.org
www.ponderosastomp.com
The Ponderosa Stomp, whose official mission is “to ensure that the unsung heroes of American music are given their due: celebrated, included, and remembered, but most of all, heard,” returns to New York City for its fourth year participating in the Roots of American Music series at the free Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival, and the nonprofit organization has again brought an amazing cast of characters. “Songs of Social Activism” will take place August 11-12, with the first day dedicated to soulful songwriters and the second to socially conscious musicians. Saturday begins with the Stoned Soul Symposium at 12:30 in Bruno Walter Auditorium, with Michele Kort hosting a discussion on Laura Nyro, Gayle Wald talking about the fortieth anniversary of the Soul at the Center festival, and Greg Tate moderating a panel on Gil Scott-Heron. At 5:00, everyone will head outside to the Damrosch Park Bandshell for Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls All-Stars Band: Sister Songwriters, led by drummer LaFrae Sci, followed at 6:00 by the Triple Goddess Twilight Revue — Celebrating the Music of Laura Nyro, with such performers as Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, Desmond Child & Rouge, Melissa Manchester, and Kate Ferber. At 7:30, the Soulful Songwriters Circle consists of Dan Penn, Teenie Hodges, and William Bell, with the great Otis Clay and the Platinum Band closing the night at 8:45. On Sunday from 12 noon to 5:30, Hearst Plaza will be home to Erin McKeown & Her Fine Parade, Taylor Mac, Tom Paxton, Daniel Kahn & the Painted Bird, and the Pura Fé Trio. The party then moves back to the bandshell, where Swamp Dogg takes the stage at 6:00 and Aloe Blacc at 7:00 before the festivities come to a stirring close with Pardon Our Analysis: An All-Star Gathering for Gil Scott-Heron, featuring the Black Rock Coalition Orchestra and such poets, writers, and musicians as Brian Jackson, Sapphire, Martha Redbone, Abiodun Oyewole, Sandra St. Victor, Cark Hancock Rux, A. Van Jordan, Gordon Voidwell, Hanifah Walidah, Willie Perdomo, and more.