The Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger, who has temporarily gone solo with her excellent LAST SUMMER disc, will be playing 4Knots on Saturday (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
South Street Seaport, Pier 17
Saturday, July 16, free, 1:00 – 8:00
www.villagevoice.com/4knots
For ten years, the Village Voice sponsored the Siren Festival, a free, all-day celebration in Coney Island that featured a virtual who’s who of the indie music scene, including such emerging and established groups as Superchunk, Guided by Voices, Sleater-Kinney, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, TV on the Radio, M.I.A., and Matt and Kim. As much fun as Siren was, it was held on two stages several blocks apart, so if you wanted to see bands in both places, you had to run back and forth down the boardwalk and lose your coveted space at one stage and hope you’d be able to get a decent spot at the other. There will be no such decision making at the inaugural 4Knots Music Festival, which has replaced Siren as the Voice’s annual summer party, and the venue has moved to the much more manageable South Street Seaport. The lineup consists of three Brooklyn bands, Mr. Dream, Eleanor Friedberger, and Oberhofer, along with San Juan’s Davila 666, New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus, and the headliner, the Austin-based Black Angels. If it gets too hot, you can take a break in the 4Knots Indoor Lounge at 210 Front St., with DJ sets from 2:00 to 12 midnight from Brahms, Punches, Finger on the Pulse, iPhone FJ Bugs Duck (Dan Deacon), and Yeasayer. As with the now-silenced Siren, 4Knots offers a great opportunity to check out a wide range of cool indie bands, and it’s all free.
At a huge gang meeting in the Bronx (actually shot in Riverside Park), the Warriors are wrongly accused of having killed Cyrus (Roger Hill), an outspoken leader trying to band all the warring factions together to form one huge force that can take over the New York City borough by borough. The Warriors then must make it back to their home turf, Coney Island, with every gang in New York lying in wait for them to pass through their territory. This iconic New York City gang movie is based on Sol Yurick’s novel, which in turn is loosely based on Xenophon’s Anabasis, which told of the ancient Greeks’ retreat from Persia. Michael Beck stars as Swan, who becomes the de-facto leader of the Warriors after Cleon (Dorsey Wright) gets taken down early. Battling Swan for control is Ajax (Sex and the City’s James Remar) and tough-talking Mercy (Too Close for Comfort’s Deborah Van Valkenburgh). Serving as a Greek chorus is Lynne (Law & Order) Thigpen as a radio DJ, and, yes, that young woman out too late in Central Park is eventual Oscar winner Mercedes Ruehl. Among the cartoony gangs of New York who try to stop the Warriors are the roller-skating Punks, the pathetic Orphans, the militaristic Gramercy Riffs, the all-girl Lizzies, the ragtag Rogues, and the inimitable Baseball Furies. Another main character is the New York City subway system. The Warriors is screening July 14 in Tompkins Square Park as part of the EPIX Movie Free for All series and will be preceded by live performance from unsigned local band Dog Soldier. In addition, EPIX will be giving away an iPad and four $100 Visa gift certificates at the event.
