SculptureCenter
Purves St. at Jackson & 43rd Aves.
Saturday, August 20, free, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
www.sculpture-center.org
SculptureCenter, one of the coolest places to see art in the five boroughs, is hosting the annual LIC Block Party on August 20 in Queens. The free afternoon, taking place inside and outside the gallery, will include live performances by Erin Markey, Daisy Press, OTIUM, Jessica Lang Dance, and Bianca Benson, DJ sets by Tygapaw, activity booths by Schuyler Tsuda, Jeannine Han & Eliza Fisher, Sam Stewart, Lauren Halsey, Jan Mun & Gil Lopez, Sydney Shen, Emma Banay & David Scanlon’s Quilt Music, Other Means, and Diamond Stingily, and an artists market with booths by American Chordata, Desert Island, Fastnet, Mixed Media, Packet Biweekly, the Perfect Nothing Catalog, Peradam, Sanguis Ornatus, and Workaday Handmade. There will also be food and drink available from such local restaurants as Bartleby & Sage, Doughnut Plant, Hibino LIC, Rockaway Brewing Co., and Stolle USA. Among the partners in the block party are the American Folk Art Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Noguchi Museum, Sculpture Space NYC, and Socrates Sculpture Park.
New York City has seen a dramatic rise in the closing of long-beloved institutions in the twenty-first century as gentrification and rent hikes soar. When filmmaker Kurt Vincent heard rumors that the Chinatown Fair arcade game haven was on the way out, he brought his camera to the Mott St. spot to document what it meant to him and the community that has been built around it since it opened back in 1944. “After all these years, the path to the arcade was ingrained, even in dreams,” he narrates at the beginning of The Lost Arcade, describing a dream he had. “As I stood in front of the doors, I could smell the arcade. The smell was a primordial memory hidden deep in my mind, somewhere beyond time and space, and somehow, in my dream, I connected with this distant and abstract memory.” Director-producer-editor Vincent and producer-writer Irene Chin, who previously collaborated on the experimental short The Bachelorette Party, have created a love letter to Chinatown Fair, affectionately known as CF, which has seen its ups and downs over the years, including a boom during the golden age of arcades in the 1980s and a problematic drop in the 2000s as kids stayed home to play video games on their computers and televisions. Vincent speaks with Anthony Cali Jr., who practically grew up in CF; former CF employees Henry Cen, Norman Burgess, Derek Rudder, and Akuma Hokura and their boss, Sam Palmer, who bought the place after visualizing it in a dream; and Lonnie Sobel, who attempted to resurrect it after its initial closure.
French director Alice Winocour follows up her 2012 Cannes hit, Augustine, with the pulse-pounding, heart-racing paranoid thriller Disorder. Matthias Schoenaerts is sensational as Vincent, a role Winocour wrote specifically for him. A veteran of special forces in Afghanistan, Vincent has been sidelined back in France, diagnosed with PTSD and awaiting medical clearance for a return to the field. He is distraught and frustrated, as his identity as a soldier is his life. While waiting to hear from the doctors, he is hired by his team leader, Denis (Paul Hamy), to join a security force for a party at a French Riviera estate, known as Maryland, owned by powerful Lebanese businessman Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp). During the party, Vincent witnesses an altercation involving Whalid, cabinet minister Pierre Duroy (Philippe Haddad), and some mysterious figures. Later, when Whalid suddenly has to leave on a business trip, Vincent comes back to the estate as a one-person security force protecting Whalid’s trophy wife, Jessie (Diane Kruger), and her young son, Ali (Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant). Vincent is instantly suspicious of everything and everyone, constantly looking over his shoulder and scanning for threats ahead, which disturbs Jessie — until it appears that Vincent just may be right.
