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.
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.
When Bill Stone first began making Triumph of the Wall: My Life as a Work in Progress, he was hoping for a meditative documentary on the nature of expectation, exploring commitment, contemplation, and connection in both life and work, both his and his subject’s. However, he ends up with something far different, and try as he might, he just can’t get it on track. Stone follows the travails of Chris Overing, a jack of all trades who has accepted a job building a one-thousand-foot dry-stone wall for an unseen client. Overing has never done anything quite like this before, and that becomes readily apparent as what he thought would be a two-month process turns into years. During that time, Stone sticks with his subject, attempting to get him to wax poetic about what he is experiencing, maybe talk about perfection, procrastination, and the possibility of ever seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, Overing doesn’t have a whole lot to say, and the vast majority of what he does say is not very philosophical. But Stone soldiers on, traveling to Scotland to talk to some professional stonemasons, and he even brings in a pair of artist friends to help work on the wall, desperate for colorful stories and more exciting human interaction. But as the frustration keeps mounting, the director stretches too far as he awkwardly, if very honestly, tries to make sense of it all. (For a much better treatise on wall building, check out Paul Auster’s 1990 novel The Music of Chance, which features a character named Stone.) At the start, Overing, Stone, and the film are filled with promise; even the director’s name makes the whole thing feel like it was meant to be. But alas, the various story lines, like so many of the stones, never quite fit together. Triumph of the Wall opens May 31 at the Quad, with Stone, Overing, and producer Fred Bohbot participating in Q&As following the 7:00 shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.