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

DOC NYC: RADIOMAN

RADIOMAN explores one man’s deep devotion to the world of movies

NEW YORK’S DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL: RADIOMAN (Mary Kerr, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Friday, November 9, 7:45, and Thursday, November 15, 11:00 am, $16.50
Festival runs November 8-15
212-924-7771
www.radiomanthemovie.com
www.docnyc.net

Craig Cataldo, also known as Craig Schwartz, is a New York icon. Better known as Radioman, he travels across the city on an old bicycle, wearing a boombox around his neck like a treasured jewel. The life of this eccentric character is now on view in the entertaining documentary Radioman. Although many might assume that Radioman is a crazy homeless drunk — something he did struggle with in the past — it turns out that Radioman is a beloved figure in the film world, appearing in more than one hundred films and television shows. He devotes his life to being an extra and hanging out on movie sets, where he converses with the stars and approaches his bit parts like they are starring roles. The documentary, directed by British filmmaker Mary Kerr, features a slew of celebrities singing the praises of Radioman, including George Clooney, Helen Mirren, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Fey, Meryl Streep, Ron Howard, and, most philosophically, Josh Brolin and Robin Williams. Kerr follows Radio, as he’s known to his closer friends, as he does his thing on local film sets, discusses his childhood and the difficult time when he was arrested and hospitalized against his will, shows off his frighteningly cramped and bug-infested apartment, and travels to Hollywood to try to get into some Oscar parties. A gregarious, well-spoken, and occasionally crude fellow with a big, scraggly gray beard, Radioman, who looks much older than his sixty-one years, is like a giant old teddy bear that you just can’t get yourself to throw away because it means that much to you. Radioman is screening November 9 and 15 at the IFC Center, with Kerr and Radioman on hand to talk about the work, as part of DOC NYC, a weeklong celebration of nonfiction film at IFC and the SVA Theatre comprising more than seventy documentaries, along with panel discussions and master classes. Among the other highlights are Artifact, about Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and their battle with their record label; Eddie Adams: Saigon ’68, which tells the story of the iconic photograph of a gun pointed at the head of a Vietnamese man; Informant, about activist and FBI mole Brandon Darby; and Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself, a look at the life and career of the beloved participatory journalist.

MORPHOSES: WITHIN (LABYRINTH WITHIN)

Morphoses explores reality and perception in multimedia WITHIN (LABYRINTH WITHIN)

Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
November 7-10, $10-$49
212-645-2904
www.joyce.org
www.morphoses.org

This past summer, the New York-based Morphoses company presented the world premiere of the multimedia WITHIN (Labyrinth Within) at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. The hour-long piece, by Swedish dancer and choreographer Pontus Lidberg, Morphoses’ current resident artistic director, examines reality and perception by combining live and projected movement. The work features Jens Weber, Gabrielle Lamb, Laura Mead, New York City Ballet’s Adrian Danchig-Waring, and American Ballet Theatre’s Isabella Boylston onstage, joined onscreen by Wendy Whelan, Giovanni Bucchieri, and Lidberg, with a score by David Lang. The November 8 performance will be preceded by a discussion led by Susan Thomasson and followed by a Dance Chat with members of the Morphoses company.

SOPHIE CALLE: THE ADDRESS BOOK

Sophie Calle’s ADDRESS BOOK is finally available in English

192 Books
192 Tenth Ave. at 21st St.
Wednesday, November 7, free with RSVP, 7:00
212-255-4022
www.192books.com
www.sigliopress.com

Nearly thirty years ago, French conceptual multimedia artist Sophie Calle found an address book in the street and decided to create a portrait of the owner (as well as herself) by contacting all of the people listed inside. “I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances. I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him,” Calle wrote at the time. She documented the results, an investigation into truth, honesty, fiction, character, and the search for information itself, in a series of columns for the daily paper Libération that enraged the owner of the address book, Pierre D., who demanded she never show the work again during his lifetime. Alas, he is no longer with us, so now we have the first-ever English-language publication of The Address Book (Siglio, September 2012, $29.95), designed as an actual lightweight address book, complete with Calle’s notes and photographs. Calle will be at 192 Books in Chelsea on November 7 at 7:00, signing copies of the new book. Space is limited, so advance reservations are required by calling 212-255-4022.

RUDE MECHS: DIONYSUS IN 69

Rude Mechs will faithfully restage Performance Group environmental theater classic DIONYSUS in 69 at New York Live Arts

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
November 6-10, $30
212-924-0077
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.rudemechs.com

In 1968, the Performance Group, an experimental SoHo theater company founded by artistic director Richard Schechner the year before, staged Dionysus in 69, an avant-garde version of Euripides’ Greek tragedy The Bacchae, which involves the beautiful young partying god Dionysus; Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who took over for his grandfather Cadmus; the blind prophet Teiresias; and Pentheus’s mother, Agauë. The production was filmed by Brian De Palma, who had been impressed by the participatory environmental show that melds audience and performer. Now the Austin-based Rude Mechs, who specialize in organic theatrical performances, are faithfully restaging Dionysus in 69 at New York Live Arts, using the original production and film as sources for the evening-length piece, which features, among other things, full-frontal male and female nudity. Once again the audience gets in on the action, as all seats are general admission on wooden platforms on the floor or accessed via ladders. The show runs November 6-10; on November 8, there will be a preperformance conversation, “The (Re)performance of Discussing Dionysus in 69,” with Schechner and Rude Mechs co-artistic producing directors Madge Darlington and Shawn Sides, while on November 9 there will be a special talk following the 7:30 performance, “Discussing Dionysus in 69, NOW,” with Schechner, Darlington, and Sides speaking with writer and dance critic Elizabeth Zimmer.

FIRST SATURDAYS — JEAN-MICHEL OTHONIEL: MY WAY

Jean-Michel Othoniel, “The Secret Happy End,” Murano glass, Saint Just’s mirror glass, metal, vintage carriage, 2008 (© Jean-Michel Othoniel)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 3, free, 5:00 – 9:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum is hosting a somewhat abbreviated version of its monthly free First Saturdays program tonight because of the hurricane, but it’s still packed with cool events built around the exhibition “Jean-Michel Othoniel: My Way,” a career survey of the idiosyncratic French artist that continues through December 2. There won’t be a dance party, but there will be live music by Slowdance, Jarana Beat, and Savoir Adore, a performance of The Blue Belt by Andrew Benincasa and Shadow Organ Theater, the experimental dance Ghost Lines by Cori Olinghouse, an origami demonstration, a movement workshop with Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory, a sensory gallery tour incorporating touch, smell, sight, and sound, an artist talk with members of Urban Glass, a glass-painting workshop, a book-club talk with Ruth B. Bottigheimer (Fairy Tales: A New History), and the psychedelic light projection “Cosmic Morning” by Don Miller. Also on view at the museum now are “Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe,” “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” and “Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn’s Faience Manufacturing Company” in addition to long-term installations and the permanent collection.

JOHN CAGE: THE SIGHT OF SILENCE

John Cage, “New River Watercolor, Series I (#3), watercolor on parchment paper, 1988 (courtesy National Academy Museum)

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 13, $15, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

The National Academy continues its transformation with the cleverly curated multimedia exhibition “John Cage: The Sight of Silence,” held in conjunction with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the seminal avant-garde artist. A controversial minimalist composer, music theoretician, Zen practitioner, I Ching follower, and longtime partner of Merce Cunningham, Cage was also a watercolorist, and the National Academy show features more than four dozen of his paintings, drawings, and etchings made primarily during his residency at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia in the 1980s and early ’90s. A short documentary reveals Cage’s fascinating process using local stones, feathers, and the same ideas of chance and complex numbering systems he employed in creating his musical compositions, resulting in gentle, spiritual works with colorful circles on paper sometimes prepared with smoke. A vitrine contains some of the elements Cage used for the pieces, which were hung by the National Academy on the walls of two galleries by chance as well, through a series of four rolls of the dice. The show also includes Cage’s 1969 Plexiglas homage to Duchamp, “Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel”; one of his unique scores; and a 1976 self-portrait. “The Sight of Silence” is supplemented by several video presentations, highlighted by a 1960 appearance Cage made on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret, performing “Water Walk,” a composition for water pitcher, iron pipe, bathtub, goose call, bottle of wine, electric mixer, whistle, sprinkling can, ice cubes, two cymbals, mechanical fish, quail call, rubber duck, tape recorder, vase of roses, seltzer siphon, five radios, bathtub, and grand piano. In addition, another monitor plays the John Cage section of Peter Greenaway’s 1983 documentary Four American Composers, which captures unusual live performances, interviews, and Cage’s interstitial “Indeterminacy Stories.” It all makes for a charming show that is likely to surprise Cage devotees as well as those unfamiliar with his oeuvre.

John Cage performs “Water Walk” on I’VE GOT A SECRET

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” Cage once explained. “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” The National Academy is making sure there is always something to see and hear with “Chance Encounters,” a series of public programs ranging from book readings and panel discussions to live dance and concerts. Among the special events: On October 28 at 3:00, William Anastasi, who played chess with Cage every day for nearly fifteen years, will read from The Cage Dialogues: A Memoir; on November 10, Joan Retallack, who wrote Musicage: Cage Muses on Words Art Music with Cage, will present “Conversation with Cage”; on December 1, exhibition cocurator Ray Kass will direct a performance of Cage’s “STEPS” by Stephen Addis; and on January 5, Du Yun will perform “Water Walk.”

IFC SNEAKS: SOMETHING IN THE AIR

The cultural revolution on the early 1970s is back in Olivier Assayas’s SOMETHING IN THE AIR

SOMETHING IN THE AIR (APRÈS MAI) (Olivier Assayas, 2012)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, October 27, 6:00
Series runs October 26-28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.ifcfilms.com

Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical coming-of-age tale Something in the Air is a fresh, exhilarating look back at a critical period in twentieth-century French history. In this sort-of follow-up to his 1994 film about 1970s teenagers, Cold Water, which starred Virginie Ledoyen as Christine and Cyprien Fouquet as Gilles, Something in the Air features newcomer Clément Métayer as a boy named Gilles and Lola Créton (Goodbye First Love) as a girl named Christine, a pair of high school students who are part of a growing underground anarchist movement. Following a planned demonstration that is violently broken up by a special brigade police force, some of the students cover their school in spray paint and political posters, leading to a confrontation with security guards that results in the arrest of the innocent Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann), which only further emboldens the anarchists. But their seething rage slowly changes as they explore the transformative world of free love, drugs, art, music, travel, and experimental film. Assayas (Les Destinées sentimentales, Summer Hours) doesn’t turn Something in the Air — the original French title is actually Après Mai, or After May, referring to the May 1968 riots — into a personal nostalgia trip. Instead it’s an engaging and charming examination of a time when young people truly cared about something other than themselves and genuinely believed they could change the world, filled with what Assayas described as a “crazy utopian hope for the future” at a New York Film Festival press conference. The talented cast also includes Félix Armand, India Salvor Menuez, Léa Rougeron, and Carole Combes as Laure, both Gilles’s and Assayas’s muse.

Assayas fills Something in the Air with direct and indirect references to such writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians as Syd Barrett, Gregory Corso, Amazing Blondel, Blaise Pascal, Kasimir Malevitch, Max Stirner, Alighiero Boetti, Joe Hill, Soft Machine, Georges Simenon, Frans Hals, and Simon Ley (The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution), not necessarily your usual batch of 1970s heroes who show up in hippie-era films. Writer-director Assayas, editors Luc Barnier and Mathilde Van de Moortel, and cinematographer Éric Gautier move effortlessly from France to Italy to England, from thrilling, fast-paced chases to intimate scenes of young love to a groovy psychedelic concert, wonderfully capturing a moment in time that is too often marginally idealized and made overly sentimental on celluloid. “We’ve got to get together sooner or later / Because the revolution’s here,” Thunderclap Newman sings in their 1969 hit “Something in the Air,” which oddly is not used in Assayas’s film, continuing, “And you know it’s right / and you know that it’s right.” Indeed, Assayas gets it right in Something in the Air, depicting a generation when revolution required a lot more than clicking a button on the internet. Something in the Air is screening October 27 at 6:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “IFC Sneaks” and will be followed by a Q&A with Menuez. The series, which runs October 26-28, offers an advance look at such upcoming IFC Films as Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, an obsessive examination of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and Walter Salles’s hotly anticipated On the Road, an adaptation of the Jack Kerouac novel with Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Kristen Stewart as Marylou, Amy Adams as Jane, Kirsten Dunst as Camille, and Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee.