Special documentary about AIDS will screen all over the city on World AIDS Day
Multiple venues
Thursday, December 1
Admission: free
www.thebody.com
www.creativetime.org/daywithoutart
www.worldaidsday.org
For the twenty-third annual World AIDS Day, which provides “an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, to show their support for people living with HIV, and to commemorate people who have died,” artists and filmmakers Jim Hodges, Carlos Marques da Cruz, and Encke King have joined together to make the hour-long Untitled, a montage that documents the history of AIDS activism, inspired by the life and career of influential artist Félix González-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996. The film will be screened for free at museums and other arts venues all over the country as part of Day With(out) Art / World AIDS Day. The film will be shown at a number of venues in New York City, including the IFC Center, where Creative Time will host a panel discussion at 7:45 (advance RSVP required) with Malik Gaines, Shanti Avirgan, and Che Gossett, moderated by Nato Thompson. You can also catch the film at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea, the Whitney, La Galleria at La MaMa, the Museum of Arts & Design, Housing Works, the New Museum, the School of Visual Arts, the Gladstone Gallery (in conjunction with Hodges’s current exhibit), the Brooklyn Museum, Exit Art (with guest speakers Zachary Barnett and Dr. Demetre Daskalakis), the Grey Art Gallery, and at Participant Inc. on the Lower East Side, where Justin Vivian Bond, whose exhibition “The Fall of the House of Whimsy” is on view there through December 18, will perform a song accompanying the screening. In addition, Visual AIDS has put together an extensive resource guide about the film, including “Suggestions for Engagement,” an HIV/AIDS timeline and alphabetical vocabulary, important links, and other information “in an effort to honor the sense of endlessness that Untitled suggests [and] for provoking both public and private conversation.”
Born in February 1939 and recognized as an enlightened reincarnation of the Trungpa tülkus when he was just thirteen months old, Chögyam Trungpa escaped his native Tibet during the 1959 Chinese invasion, eventually becoming a central figure in the spread of Tibetan Buddhism throughout the West. Filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas (Right Out of History: The Making of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party), a former student and friend of Chögyam Trungpa’s, recounts his unusual story in the adulatory Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. “From the first seminar, called ‘The Battle of Ego” in Los Angeles, to filming his cremation on a cloudless but rainbow-filled day in Vermont, Chögyam Trungpa literally blew my mind,” Demetrakas explains on the film’s official website. His fascinating tale is liable to blow your mind too. Chögyam Trungpa invited Demetrakas into his inner circle from 1983 to 1987, allowing her intimate access to his wild life, which included exchanging his monk’s robes for a business suit and later a pseudo-military uniform, confusing his followers and angering his critics. A proponent of what he called “crazy wisdom,” Chögyam Trungpa studied at Oxford, suffered partial paralysis in a car accident, married a sixteen-year-old westerner, smoked cigarettes, was a heavy drinker, and carried on dalliances with many of his female students while teaching about fear, self-deception, the ego, spiritual materialism, and the importance of meditation. “You can survive by doing nothing,” he preached, but he alienated some with his nontraditional actions, leading him to be known as the “Bad Boy of Buddhism.” Trying to get to the bottom of the complicated man who founded such learning centers as the Naropa Institute and Shambhala, Demetrakas speaks with Chögyam Trungpa’s wife, Diana Mukpo, his lover Agness Au, and his eldest son, Sakyong Mipham; such fellow teachers as Pema Chodron and Ram Dass; poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman; and various other scholars, journalists, and former students, supplemented by archival footage and clips from his teachings, which together paint a compelling portrait of a most colorful and singular individual. Crazy Wisdom is scheduled for a one-week limited engagement at the Rubin Museum beginning November 25, with all screenings (several of which are beginning to sell out) followed by Q&As with such special guests as Demetrakas, Waldman, Au, Meredith Monk, Tulku Jamyang Rinpoche, and others.
First and foremost, don’t link Bridesmaids in with all those lousy Saturday Night Live one-note movies and the string of overrated and overhyped lowbrow trash streaming out of the Judd Apatow factory. And don’t assume it’s a silly chick flick either. As it turns out, Bridesmaids is one of the most consistently funny laugh-out-loud romps of this young century. Directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig, Bridesmaids is an endlessly clever and insightful examination of love, loneliness, and friendship starring SNL’s Kristen Wiig, who cowrote the smart script with Groundlings member Annie Mumolo (who makes a cameo as a nervous flyer). Wiig shows surprising depth and range as Annie, a perennial screw-up whose closest childhood friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is marrying into a very snooty upper-crust family. After agreeing to be Lillian’s maid of honor, Annie gets involved in a battle of wits with Lillian’s future sister-in-law, the elegant Helen (a radiant Rose Byrne), who is determined to outshine Annie in every way possible and steal Lillian away from her. Already a mess — she had to close her bakery, she shares an apartment with a bizarre pair of British siblings, she works in a jewelry store where she drives away potential customers with her sorry tales of woe, and she allows herself to be treated miserably as a late-night booty call for a self-centered businessman (Jon Lamm) — Annie experiences a series of hysterical, pathetic setbacks as she attempts to organize the bridal shower and bachelorette party, including a riotous potty-humor scene in a high-end boutique that is likely to go down in comedy history for its sheer relentlessness. The rest of the bridesmaids are quite a hoot — Becca (Ellie Kemper), the Disney-loving kewpie doll; Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), a foul-mouthed married mother who can’t wait to go crazy away from her family; and the groom’s burly sister, Megan (the hugely entertaining Melissa McCarthy), who lives life without a filter. Annie is so caught up in her own failures that she doesn’t recognize when something potentially good enters her life, in the form of state trooper Nathan Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd). Wiig gives the finest performance of her career as Annie, clearly a role that is very close to her heart. Despite the slapstick nature of many of the jokes, Bridesmaids is filled with heart and soul, making it one of the best comedies in years.
