SELECTED SHORTS
Symphony Space, Peter Jay Sharp Theatre
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Wednesday, April 23, $28, 7:30
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.gvshp.org
CELEBRATE YOUR VILLAGE!
Three Lives & Company
154 West Tenth St.
Tuesday, April 29, free, 6:00
212-741-2069
www.threelives.com
“My mother used to say, ‘If you want to be young forever, move to the Village,’” Isaac Mizrahi writes in his contribution to the new book Greenwich Village Stories: A Collection of Memories (Universe, March 2014, $29.95), continuing, “I arrived more than twenty years ago and have lived here ever since. I will probably move out feet first.” A lot of people feel that way about Greenwich Village, one of the most famous and fanciful locations in the world. The book features brief recollections by more than sixty downtown New Yorkers, from fashion designers and musicians to poets and actors, from writers and politicians to newscasters and local business owners. Edited by Judith Stonehill, co-owner of the New York Bound Bookshop, which opened in 1976 at the South Street Seaport and closed in 1997 at its later home in Rockefeller Center, the book, a project of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation contains pieces by Wynton Marsalis, Malcolm Gladwell, Patricia Clarkson, Calvin Trillin, Linda Ellerbee, Nat Hentoff, Donna Karan, Lou Reed, Mimi Sheraton, Mario Batali, Karen Finley, and Ed Koch, among many others, each memory accompanied by a related photograph or painting. “Walking through the Village is to brush against immortality,” Stonehill writes in the foreword. “Our cherished neighborhood is no longer as creative and raffish these days, or so it’s said, but there are many things that seem unchanged in the Village.” On April 23, contributors Dave Hill, Penny Arcade, Simon Doonan, Ralph Lee, and Mizrahi will gather at Symphony Space for a special Selected Shorts presentation, reading their pieces, joined by Village residents Parker Posey and Jane Curtin, who will read Village-set fiction, in an evening hosted by BD Wong. In addition, on April 29 at 6:00, Three Lives & Company invites people to “Come Celebrate Your Village!,” a reception, meet and greet, and book signing with Greenwich Village Stories contributors Lauren Belfer, Karen Cooper, Tony Hiss, Bob Holman, Anita Lo, Matt Umanov, and Trillin.
Husband-and-wife filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash follow a flock of sheep herded by a family of Norwegian-American cowboys on their last sojourns through the public lands of Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in the gorgeously photographed, surprisingly intimate, and sometimes very funny documentary Sweetgrass. In 2001, Castaing-Taylor, director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, and Barbash, a curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, found out about the Allestad ranch, an old-fashioned, Old West group of sheepherders who still did everything by hand, including leading hundreds of sheep on a 150-mile journey into the mountains for summer pasture with only a few dogs and horses. Director Castaing-Taylor uses no voice-over narration or intertitles, instead inviting the viewer to join in the story as if in the middle of the action, offering no judgments or additional information. The film begins with shearing and feeding, then birthing and mothering, before heading out on the long, sometimes treacherous trail, especially at night, when bears and wolves sneak around, looking for food. Slowly the focus switches to the men themselves, primarily an old-time singing grizzled ranch hand and a cursing, complaining cowboy. Castaing-Taylor and Barbash spent three years with the sheepherders and in the surrounding areas, amassing more than two hundred hours of footage and making to date nine films out of their experiences, mostly shorter works to be displayed in gallery installations or for anthropological reasons; Sweetgrass is the only one that has been released theatrically, offering a fascinating look at something that is destined to soon be gone forever. Sweetgrass is screening April 17 at 6:30 in the Focus on the Sensory Ethnography Lab section of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Art of the Real,” held in conjunction with the Whitney Biennial, and will be followed by a Q&A with Barbash. The inaugural festival runs April 11-26, featuring more than three dozen works that push the boundaries of documentary film.
