this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

BIG APPLE BARBECUE BLOCK PARTY 2013

Nearly 150,000 hungry people are expected to line up at the eleventh annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party this weekend

Madison Square Park
23rd to 26th Sts. between Fifth & Madison Aves.
Saturday, June 8, and Sunday, June 9, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: free; $9 per plate of barbecue, $3 per drink
www.bigapplebbq.org
www.madisonsquarepark.org

One of the season’s most crowded festivals, the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party will be serving up bbq from eighteen pitmasters in Madison Square Park on Saturday and Sunday, along with foot-stompin’ music, seminars, cooking demonstrations, and other events. A variety of ’cue will be prepared by Mike Mills (Memphis Championship Barbecue, Las Vegas, 17th Street Bar & Grill, Murphysboro, IL), Scott Roberts (Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, TX), Joe Duncan (Baker’s Ribs in Dallas), Garry Roark (Ubon’s Barbecue in Yazoo City), Chris Lilly (Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, AL), Drew Robinson (Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Q in Birmingham), Patrick Martin (Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint in Nashville), Mike Emerson (Pappy’s Smokehouse in St. Louis), Tommy Houston (Checkered Pig in Danville, VA), Rodney Scott (Scott’s Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, SC), Jimmy Hagood (BlackJack Barbecue in Charleston), Ed Mitchell (Raleigh), John Wheeler (Memphis Barbecue Co., Horn Lake, MS), and Sam Jones (Skylight Inn, Ayden, NC). The New York City entrants are John Stage (Dinosaur Bar-B-Que), Kenny Callaghan (Blue Smoke), and Charles Grund Jr. (Hill Country). The Saturday music lineup features the Spampinato Brothers (1:00), Barrence Whitfield & the Savages (2:45), and Marcia Ball (4:30), with Sunday consisting of the Myles Mancuso Band (1:00), Elizabeth Cook (2:45), and the Dirty Guv’nahs (4:30). Among the seminars are “From Tide to Table” with Chris Hastings, “Barbecue & Bivalves” with Mike Lata, “A Cure for What Ails You” with John Currence, and “Smoke, Bitters, Cucumbers, and Citrus . . . Cocktails from the Kitchen” with Joseph Lenn and Ashley Christensen. New this year is the Weber Grilling School, which will hold classes with Kevin Kolman; tickets are $30 and include a copy of Weber’s New Real Grilling cookbook. To best navigate the crowds, we suggest going with a group of friends, with each person waiting on a different line, then meeting up for your feast while listening to the live music.

BOOK LAUNCH: TAIPEI BY TAO LIN

powerHouse Arena
37 Main St. at Water St., Brooklyn
Wednesday, June 5, free (advance RSVP appreciated), 7:00
718-666-3049
www.powerhousearena.com
www.taolin.info

“It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. Paul had resigned himself to not speaking and was beginning to feel more like he was ‘moving through the universe’ than ‘walking on a sidewalk.’”

So begins Tao Lin’s third novel, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries, June 4, $14.95), the official launch of which takes place June 5, with people walking toward DUMBO to attend the book-release party at the art gallery/bookstore/event space powerHouse Arena. (Wine will be served, and the festivities will be DJ’d by Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly and Carrie Battan.) The follow-up to his earlier novels, 2007’s Eeeee Eee Eeee and 2010’s Richard Yates, in addition to several story and poetry collections, Taipei follows a writer as he goes off on a book tour, visits his parents in their native Taipei, and experiences disaffection with the state of his personal world. “In his tiredness and inattention these intuitions manifested in Paul as an uncomplicated feeling of bleakness — that he was in the center of something bad, whose confines were expanding, as he remained in the same place,” Lin writes. “Faintly he recognized in this a kind of humor, but mostly he was aware of the rain, continuous and everywhere as an incognizable information, as he crossed the magnified street, gleaming and blacker from wetness, to return to the party.” It’s not supposed to rain tomorrow night, when the literati gather at powerHouse to celebrate Lin, who is staking his claim to be the Millennial Generation’s Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and/or Douglas Coupland. Lin, who was born in Virginia and currently lives in Manhattan, will also be at McNally Jackson on Prince St. on June 27 at 7:00 in conversation with Christian Lorentzen, at Spoonbill & Sugartown on July 9 for a reading and Q&A, and at BookCourt on July 22 as part of a panel discussion with Marie Calloway and Ryan McNamara, moderated by Mike Vilensky. For an unfortunately out-of-focus video of Lin, who is also the founder and editor of Muumuu House, doing a guerrilla reading at MoMA on April 20 as part of Transform the World! Poetry Must Be Made by All!, go here.

DANCE CONVERSATIONS 2013

Motley Dance’s DRILL PIECE examines the social and cultural aspects of gender and the military (photo by Victoria Masters)

The Flea Theater
41 White St. between Broadway & Church St.
June 4-14, Tuesday – Friday, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
212-352-3101
www.theflea.org

The Flea’s free annual Dance Conversations series returns June 4-13, giving dancers and choreographers the opportunity to present new pieces, excerpts, and works-in-progress, then discuss their creative process with the audience and special moderators. This year’s festival, curated by Nina Winthrop, gets under way on June 4 with Susan Thomasson & Elissaveta Iordanova (Who’s Going to Blink?), David Appel (more than a murmur), Amy Cova Dance (Spinal Streets and a Straw), and Motley Dance (Drill Piece), followed by a talk moderated by Molissa Fenley. On June 5, the lineup includes Daniela Hoff Dance Company (Mirror), Claire Porter/PORTABLES (Falling for Prepositions), and Naomi Goldberg Haas (The Dress), with moderator Rebecca Lazier. On June 6, there will be performances by Inclined Dance Project (Stuck Together Pieces), Barbara Mahler’s Dances (When She Stumbles), Ian Wen & Irina Kom (Houseguest de novo), and KATES (KATES: which is unusual), with moderator Joanna Kotze, while June 7 features GREYZONE (Waves), Tomomi Imai (Deep Blue), and Khaleah London/LAYERS (The Ultimatum), with moderator Kimberly Bartosik. The second week includes such companies and choreographers as binbinFactory/Satoshi Haga & Rie Fukuzawa, Krista Jansen, Jesse Phillips-Fein, Megan Sipe/Dancing Fish Productions, and Rosario, with moderators Gus Solomons jr, Jody Oberfelder, Pooh Kaye, and Winthrop. Dance Conversations is a great forum for dance enthusiasts to get sneak peeks at works from emerging and midcareer choreographers and go behind the scenes of their creations in intimate discussions.

QUEER/ART/FILM: PERFORMANCE

Mick Jagger puts on quite a show in Nicolas Roeg’s trippy PERFORMANCE

Mick Jagger puts on quite a show in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s trippy PERFORMANCE

PERFORMANCE (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, June 3, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from Donald (The Demon Seed) Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid. We fall somewhere in the middle of all of that. Performance is screening in a 35mm print June 3 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Queer/Art/Film” and will be followed by a discussion with artist, writer, documentarian, and activist Gregg Bordowitz. The monthly series, which consists of films selected by gay New York City artists, continues July 22 with Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night, chosen by Amadéus Leopold, and August 19 with Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, picked by Chitra Ganesh.

FIRST SATURDAY: LIFE, DEATH, AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE AMERICAS

“Raw/Cooked: Michael Ballou” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Michael Ballou, “Go-Go,” acrylic board, monofilament, wire, plywood, plastic cups, rug, with soundtrackby Kurt Hoffman and David Scher, 2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum’s long-term installation “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas” is the centerpiece of the June edition of its popular First Saturday program, with a special focus on Peru. The free monthly program will include live performances by Claudia Acuña, Chicha Libre, Rebel Diaz, Marcos Napa, and Mariachi Flor de Toloache, pop-up gallery talks, storytelling presented by the Redhawk Native American Arts Council, a curator talk of the featured exhibit led by Nancy Rosoff and Susan Kennedy Zeller, a Hands-On Art workshop in which participants can make a clay figure, and a participatory despacho ceremony, in which Q’ero healers Don Francisco and Doña Juana invoke reciprocity and loving-kindness. The galleries will remain open late so visitors can also check out “John Singer Sargent Watercolors,” a lovely collection of nearly one hundred stunning works that are a celebration of light and color; “LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital,” moving black-and-white portraits of Frazier and her mother and grandmother; “Käthe Kollwitz: Prints from the ‘War’ and ‘Death’ Portfolios,” devastating woodcut prints by the German Expressionist artist that display the horrors of battle, influenced by the loss of her son in WWI; “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui,” a revelatory career retrospective of the fascinating oeuvre of the African artist who uses bottle caps and found metal and wood to create fascinating pieces; “‘Workt by Hand’: Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts,” comprising nearly three dozen American and European quilts; “Raw/Cooked: Michael Ballou” and “Dog Years” by the Williamsburg-based artist, who plays with light and shadow in the former, man’s best friend in the latter; and “Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories,” in which Hegarty wreaks havoc on two of the museum’s Period Rooms.

BROOKLYN FILM FESTIVAL 2013

Billy Kent’s HAIRBRAINED kicks off the 2013 Brooklyn Film Festival

Windmill Studios NYC, 287 Kent Ave.
indieScreen, 289 Kent Ave.
May 31 – June 9, full festival pass $100, four pack pass $30, individual screenings $12
www.brooklynfilmfestival.org

The Brooklyn Film Festival gets under way tonight, kicking off nine days of screenings and special events at Windmill Studios NYC and indieScreen in Williamsburg. The opening-night selection is the world premiere of Billy Kent’s Harebrained, a twisted college tale starring Alex Wolff, Julia Garner, Brendan Fraser, and Parker Posey. The festival comprises thirteen feature films and nearly one hundred shorts, including animation, experimental, and documentary works from twenty-two countries. The ninth annual KidsFilmFest will take place on June 1, while the BFF Exchange meet-and-greet is set for June 8, followed by the Brooklyn Meets Spain program, with a free 5:30 screening of Manuel H. Martín’s 30 Años de Oscuridad. Among the other feature films are Justin Reichman’s thriller A Wife Alone, with Genevieve Hudson-Price and Sean Patrick Reilly; Nathan Silver’s New York City–set Soft in the Head; Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s post-9/11 love story, Flying Blind; and Arne Toonen’s crime tale, Black Out. Q&As with members of the cast and/or crew will follow many of the screenings; the free awards ceremony is scheduled for closing night at 10:00.

BUSHWICK OPEN STUDIOS 2013

Bushwick Open Studios will feature live performance, film, art, a neighborhood fair, a community mural, and more this weekend

Various locations indoors and outdoors in Bushwick
May 31 – June 2, most events free
www.artsinbushwick.org

The seventh annual Bushwick Open Studios takes place this weekend, consisting of three days of art, live performance, film, and other artistic endeavors. The official launch party gets going at 8:00 Friday night ($10) at Shea Stadium with Eula, Air Waves, Lodro, Darlings, and DJ Mr. Ad Hoc; there will also be concerts Friday afternoon at Don Pedro and Saturday afternoon at Lone Wolf. The neighborhood will come together for the public mural “How Does Food Unite People,” Hybrid Theatre Works will present an evening of performance art, Bossa Nova Civic Club will host a late-night Electronic Music Showcase, Brooklyn Fireproof East will be home to the Moving Forward concert, 3rd Ward will exhibit the group show “Walking into the Dashboard” (compiled from the World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium), CinemaSunday will include screenings followed by Q&As with the filmmakers, and Community Day in Maria Hernandez Park features arts & crafts, live music, family-friendly activities, yoga, and more.