237 Lafayette St. near Spring St., tenth floor
Thursday, January 19, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.ethannichtern.com
Shastri Ethan Nichtern, a Shambhala teacher and founder of the Interdependence Project, has followed up his 2007 nonfiction trade paperback, One City, in which he examined egolessness, interdependence, enlightenment, and spirituality in a fun and fascinating way, with his fiction debut, the digital book Your Emoticons Won’t Save You. The breezy tale is set in 1998, when Alex Bardo and a group of his college-aged childhood friends are on a road trip to the camp they went to when they were kids, setting the stage for a series of memories and flashbacks about life, love, friendship, and growing up. “She looked like she was about to say something else about me, something très annoying about who I am and who I used to be and who I should become, but she didn’t,” narrator Alex says at one point about his former girlfriend. The story involves bad mix tapes, naked frolicking, car games, micro-losses of virginity, and the Wannabe Poets Brigade; the novel concludes with a selection of Alex’s poetry, featuring such titles as “A Wary Invitation to My Future Child,” “Urban Planning,” “Aw, Nuts,” and “A PostPostModern Definition of Egolessness.” If you read the fine print, you’ll discover that “aggression still tantalizes us,” “obsession’s like a bungee cord,” “delusion emits a steady hum,” “kids don’t get to make any decisions,” “parents argue over money and then slam doors shut,” “when people smile they look guilty,” and “you will become what you hate — it’s inevitable.” Nichtern will be reading from Your Emoticons Won’t Save You at a release party on January 19 at 237 Lafayette St. In addition, Ethan and his father, David Nichtern, a musician, composer, producer, Emmy winner, and senior Buddhist teacher, will be teaming up for the weekend workshop “The Art of Being Human” January 20-22 at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York.
For The Interrupters, director, producer, and editor Steve James (Hoop Dreams, At the Death House Door) teamed up with journalist Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here) to hit the dangerous inner-city streets of Chicago with the men and women of CeaseFire, a grass-roots organization of former gang members who are now trying to stop the violence. Inspired by Kotlowitz’s New York Times Magazine article, the two men concentrate on three primary stories. Ameena Matthews, the Muslim daughter of notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, is working with a deeply troubled young woman who’d rather fight than flee, even if it means being sent back to prison. Cobe Williams has his hands full with the angry, recently released Flamo, who thinks the whole world is against him. And Eddie Bocanegra is attempting to come to grips with a cold-blooded revenge murder he committed when he was a teenager by visiting schools and talking about turning his life around. One of the most poignant moments of the film occurs when Williams brings Lil Mikey back to the barbershop he and several of his cohorts robbed at gunpoint as he again faces some of his victims. Matthews, Williams, and Bocanegra are paid employees of CeaseFire, which was founded by Dr. Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who believes that violence is a disease that can be treated in similar ways, and is run by Tio Hardman, who handles his extremely tough task with intelligence and dignity as he deals with what he calls “the madness.” But in a society in which “words’ll get you killed,” as Matthews says early on, these tireless violence interrupters put their own lives on the line every day, battling a sickness that seems to have no end in sight. The award-winning film, a hit at numerous film festivals, felt a bit long at its original 144 minutes, but James edited it down to a more streamlined 124 minutes for its recent theatrical release. The Interrupters is screening January 12 at 8:00 at the IFC Center as part of the Stranger than Fiction series and will be followed by a Q&A with the director.
Curator Sylvia Savadjian and the Maysles Institute have put together a terrific program for Wednesday night, offering audiences the opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating characters they’re ever likely to come upon. Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. Rembert will be at the Maysles Institute on January 11 for a reception, a screening of All Me, and what should be an enlightening Q&A with Ducat. And if you’re as captivated by Rembert’s story as we are, you can see more of his work in his “Amazing Grace” exhibition, running January 21 through May 5 at the 
