this week in music

CREST FEST

Crest Hardware
558 Metropolitan Ave. between Lorimer & Union
Saturday, June 30, free, 1:00 – 7:00
www.cresthardwareartshow.com

One of the grooviest events of the summer, Crest Fest is a celebration of art, music, food, crafts, and hardware. More than a hundred artists fill the Crest Hardware Store on Metropolitan Ave. with works of art that incorporate items readily available in the store and place them on the walls, racks, floor, and ceiling as if they are part of the regular merchandise — although they will cost you a little more than standard tools. Make your way through aisles and aisles of fun stuff before heading out the back to walk through the garden, grab a bite to eat, and check out some live bands. This year’s musical lineup includes PitchBlak Brass Band, Aabaraki, Workout, Hard Nips, and Grey Sky Appeal, along with DJ sets by Petey Complex, King Cut, Lucas Walters, Peter Hale, Dom Leon, and Krunk Pony. Among the vendors are Mighty Balls, Jessy’s Pastries, Tirana Jewelry, Grand Wazoo Clothing and Other Wondrous Things, Vicolo Mio, Seam, WRKN Class, Daly Pie, North Brooklyn Vineyard, Erika Day Designs, Old Hollywood, and Fantasy Clocks. The opening party and exhibit is a fundraiser for the City Reliquary, the museum and civic organization down the street on Metropolitan.

COOKING CHANNEL SUMMER EATS POP-UP TOUR: SMORGASBURG

EDEN EATS host Eden Grinshpan pulls into Williamsburg to help celebrate Cooking Channel’s second birthday

Williamsburg waterfront between North Sixth & North Seventh Sts.
Saturday, June 30, free, 1:00 – 5:00 pm
www.brooklynflea.com/smorgasburg
cookingchanneltv.com

The Cooking Channel is celebrating its second anniversary with a summer food tour that pulls into Smorgasburg on Saturday afternoon. The party will feature Le Cordon Bleu graduate Eden Grinshpan, host of Eden Eats, and Bronx-based Baron Ambrosia, host of The Culinary Adventures of Baron Ambrosia. There will be special treats to sample (including grilled squash quesadillas, pulled pork sandwiches, fried catfish, five-spice lamb burgers, Georgia lattice-topped peach pie, and red velvet cupcakes), meet and greets with the stars, and live music. If you’ve never been to Smorgasburg, you’ve been missing out on one of New York’s best culinary experiences. Every Saturday, more than one hundred vendors fill a vacant space on the Williamsburg waterfront, directly accessible by a quick ride on the East River Ferry. You can find just about anything you want there, from Mile End, McLure’s Pickles, and Baby Got Back Ribs to Taste of Ethiopia, Sunday Gravy, and Sun Noodle Ramen, from Saucy by Nature, DuMont Burger, and Blue Bottle Coffee to Handsome Hank’s Fish Hut, Rachel’s Pies, and Kings County Jerky. We like starting with the breakfast taco from Cemita’s, followed by maple bacon on a stick from Landhaus, the bulgogi burger from Asiadog, and a Salvadoran specialty from Solber Pupusas. Dessert’s a tough decision, with fine fare from Lush Candy, Danny’s Macaroons, Cutie Pies, Fine & Raw Chocolate, Kumquat Cupcakery, and our fave, the giant s’more from S’more Bakery. Other choices include slow smoked St. Louis spare ribs from Mighty Quinn’s, caramel chorizo lollipops from Bocata, fried anchovies from Bon Chovie, Nordic sushi from Noshi, and the fried Brussels sprouts sandwich with apple and whiskey from I8NY. Some of the vendors come back on Sunday, when Smorgasburg morphs into the Brooklyn Flea, a market that sells handcrafted items, antiques, collectibles, clothing, and plenty of oddities.

VIDEO OF THE DAY — STILL FLYIN’: “SPIRITS”

San Francisco collective Still Flyin’ makes synth-heavy indie dance pop that floats on a sea of ethereal grooviness. On their new album, On a Bedroom Wall (Ernest Jenning, May 2012), the follow-up to their 2009 debut full-length, Never Gonna Touch the Ground, founder Sean “SA” Rawls leads the large troupe through such lighthearted musical journeys as “Elsie Dormer,” “Travelin’ Man,” “Spirits,” and “Candlemaker.” “Ain’t nothing gonna hold me down / Ain’t nothing gonna torch my town,” a chorus sings on “Cleat Talking,” channeling a bit of Matthew Wilder, continuing, “I ain’t no Stephen Hawking / My cleats do all the talking.” Still Flyin’, which features a large cast of characters that includes Yoshi Nakamoto, Tater Moran, Bren Mead, Momo Niubo, Big Lord Saucedo, Gary Olson, Marky Monnone, Thrilla Horan, Izzo Knowles, Mookie Schweitzer-Rawls, Marjan Esfandiari, Jammy Knight, and more, will be headlining the early show at the Mercury Lounge on June 27 with Radical Dads.

AN EVENING WITH CINEMA 16

Standish Lawder’s COLOR FILM is one of several experimental works being presented with a special new score at latest Cinema 16 event

The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday, June 26, $12, 7:00
212-255-5793 ext11
www.thekitchen.org

In her first Cinema 16 presentation since her June 2011 show at the Met and the April 2012 passing of original Cinema 16 founder Amos Vogel, photographer and curator Molly Surno continues to keep the experimental aesthetic alive and well with another unique program at the Kitchen. On June 26, the Los Angeles-born, Brooklyn-based Surno will pair a specially commissioned score by New York City musician and visual artist Matteah Baim with a quartet of shorts: Standish Lawder’s 1971 Color Film, in which different colored strips make their way through a projector to music by the Mothers of Invention; Sabrina Ratte’s 2010 Mirages, a kaleidoscopic collaboration with Le Révélateur; Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie Diagonale, an early abstract silent examination of time and space; and Len Lye’s 1953 Color Cry, a series of photograms initially set to Sonny Terry’s “Fox Chase.” Following the presentation, everyone is invited to the after-party across the street at Gasser & Grunert gallery, which is currently displaying Rodney Dickson’s “Painting” exhibition.

MONET’S GARDEN

“Monet’s Garden” will change with the seasons at the New York Botanical Garden (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The New York Botanical Garden
2900 Southern Blvd.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 21, $8-$25
718-817-8700
www.nybg.org
monet’s garden slideshow

“My most beautiful work of art is my garden,” Impressionist master Claude Monet once explained to his stepson. That statement is at the heart of the wide-ranging New York Botanical Garden exhibition “Monet’s Garden,” on view through October 21 in the Bronx oasis. In 1883, the forty-two-year-old Monet moved with his family into a house in Giverny, where he spent the second half of his life developing magnificent gardens and creating some of his most famous masterpieces, paintings based on the natural world he immersed himself in. The New York Botanical Garden has transformed the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory into a tribute to Monet, complete with a facade of his house and a re-creation of the Grand Allée from the Clos Normand and the famed Japanese footbridge. The long, narrow path is lined with many of the plants that bloomed in Giverny and will change seasonally, beginning with such flowers as irises, morning glories, aubretias, roses, delphiniums, foxgloves, peonies, and poppies. Visitors can walk across the green footbridge, then head outside to the Conservatory Courtyard’s Hardy Pool, which is filled with water lilies and other aquatic plants similar to the ones Monet collected after having been introduced to Nymphaeas by Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. As you make your way over to the library, you can stroll along the Monet to Mallarmé Poetry Walk, featuring French Symbolist poems, inspired by nature, by Monet contemporaries Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé, who were doing with words what Monet was doing with paint.

Claude Monet, “The Artist’s Garden in Giverny,” oil on canvas, circa 1900 (courtesy Yale University Art Gallery)

The library’s Rondina Gallery is home to several vitrines of photographs of Monet by himself and with friends in the garden in addition to letters, sales receipts, and a glorious palette he used between 1914 and 1926, a work of art in itself. The gallery is also displaying two of Monet’s paintings, the lush and beautiful “The Artist’s Garden in Giverny” and the darker, more mysterious “Irises,” which has never before been shown in the United States. Upon exiting the library, be sure to stop by the Ross Gallery, where Elizabeth Murray’s “Seasons of Giverny” consists of more than two dozen photographs taken by Murray, who has been documenting the garden for a quarter century. Curated by Monet expert Dr. Paul Hayes Tucker, “Monet’s Garden” is supplemented by a series of special events and technological enhancements, including a free iPhone app, an audio tour, weekend screenings of the films The Impressionists: Monet and Monet’s Palate, monthly poetry salons, “Monet’s Friends” chamber music concerts, “Monet Evenings” water lily concerts, home-gardening demonstrations, adult education classes, and “Observe and Create” workshops for children. “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers,” Monet wrote in an 1890 letter to art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The New York Botanical Garden celebrates both of these aspects of one of the world’s most beloved artists.

DUAL VIDEO OF THE DAY — FREEZEPOP: “DOPPELGANGER”

Doppelgängers tend to be ghostly doubles of living people, but in the case of electronica popsters Freezepop, it’s a case of audio duality as well. On their new EP, Doppelgänger (Archenemy, June 22), the Boston-based quartet has revisited one song from their 2011 album, Secret Companion, and three tracks from their 2010 release, Imaginary Friends, including four remixes of “Doppelgänger,” on which Liz Enthusiasm repeatedly points out, “She looks like me, she looks just like me / Why don’t you see it / She dances like me, dances just like me / Why don’t you see it.”

The band, which also features Sean Drinkwater on keyboards and guitar, Christmas Disco-Marie Sagan on keyboards, vocoder, and theremin, and Bananas Foster on keyboards and drums, even continues the doubling theme with two interchangeable videos for the endlessly bouncy “Doppelgänger,” which you can flip between here. Freezepop will be holding a synth-heavy EP release party June 22 at the Knitting Factory, on a bill with Lifestyle and Kitten Berry Crunch, followed by a gig at Water Street in Rochester on June 24 with Lifestyle and Silent Auction.

MAKE MUSIC NEW YORK

Amateur and professional musicians will gather all over the city for annual Make Music New York festival (photo courtesy NYC Guitar School)

Every June 21, Make Music New York celebrates the longest day of the year with a full slate of free concerts in limitless genres throughout the five boroughs, in parks, libraries, restaurants, stores, plazas, and out on the street and aboard party buses. Not only can you check out some great shows but you can also participate; Mass Appeal once again features nearly two dozen performances in which everyone is invited to bring their own instrument and join in, with accordions in Sheridan Triangle, bagpipes in Herald Square, cellos in Flatiron Building Plaza, clarinets in Washington Square Park, double reeds in Bleecker Playground, flutes on Central Park’s Great Hill, guitars in Union Square and at the 92nd St. Y, harps in Urban Plaza, mandolins in Theodore Roosevelt Park, ouds in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, ukuleles in McCarren Park, and violins on Cornelia St., among other gatherings. And you don’t need an instrument at all to take part in humming in the DUMBO ConEd Farragut Substation and singing in Times Square. Some of the more unusual shows include Alvin Curran’s “Maritime Rites” played by eighty musicians on rowboats on the lake in Central Park at 5:00, a gospel parade with the Lafayette Inspirational Ensemble in Park Slope at 6:30, improvisational jazz on the High Line at 6:30, and Erik Satie’s eighteen-hour “Vexations” continuing through midnight on the corner of Broad & Wall Sts.