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

NEW YORK COMIC CON / ANIME FEST SPOTLIGHT: MAKOTO SHINKAI

THE PLACE PROMISED IN OUR EARLY DAYS will be screened at the New York Anime Fest as part of tribute to filmmaker Makoto Shinkai

THE PLACE PROMISED IN OUR EARLY DAYS (Makoto Shinkai, 2004)
Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
655 West 34th St. (11th Ave. between 34th & 39th Sts.)
Friday Pass $35, three-day pass $65, four-day pass $85
www.newyorkcomiccon.com
www.advfilms.com
www.kumonomukou.com

Makoto Shinkai, who took the anime world by storm with his 2003 hit Voices of a Distant Star, a short film made completely on his home computer, followed that up with his first feature-length work, the magical and mystical The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Set in an alternate futuristic post-WWII world, The Place Promised centers on three friends, Hiroki, Takuya, and Sayuri, who make a vow to fly Hiroke and Takuya’s plane, Bela C’ielo, into the Tower, a monolithic structure rising into the sky that symbolizes the postwar division into the Union and U.S.-Japanese forces. With war imminent, an older Takuya and Hiroki find themselves on opposing sides, with Sayuri lost in a coma dreamworld. Although the plot — especially the science aspects — gets rather complex and confusing, The Place Promised is a beautiful-looking film, both tenderly sweet and harshly depressing, presenting a rather bleak forecast of the future. But stunning visual moments such as a setting sun with an illuminated halo that forms a shining star twinkling into an abandoned factory make it all worth it. Shinkai’s film was deservedly named Best Animated Film at the Mainichi Film Awards, where it topped the much more heralded Steamboy (Katsuhiro Otomo, 2004) and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004). The career of the thirty-eight-year-old anime auteur is being celebrated at this year’s New York Comic Con / New York Anime Festival, which will include screenings of Voices of a Distant Star (October 14, Room 1A18, 12:30), The Place Promised in Our Early Days (October 14, Room 1A18, 1:15), the three-part 5 Centimeters Per Second (October 14, Room 1A18, 3:00), and his latest, Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (October 16, IGN Theater, 11:00 am), with Shinkai on hand to introduce this New York premiere.

MEET THE AUTHOR: HILLEL M. FINESTONE, THE PAIN DETECTIVE

Dr. Hillel Finestone, the Pain Detective, is determined to make you feel better (photo by Pat McGrath for the Ottawa Citizen)

Kips Bay Library
446 Third Ave. at East 31st St.
Thursday, October 13, free, 5:00
212-683-2520
www.paindetective.net
www.nypl.org

A gregarious, amiable sort, Dr. Hillel Finestone just wants to make you feel better, and he’s determined to stop at nothing to achieve that goal. The Canadian physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist and researcher recently moved to New York City, and he will introduce himself to the community on October 13 at 5:00 when he talks about his most recent book, The Pain Detective: Every Ache Tells A Story (Praeger Press, September 2009, $44.95), at the Kips Bay branch of the New York Public Library. “The patient and doctor may have to retrieve clues and key bits of information to create a whole diagnostic picture,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “It’s like a detective trying to crack a murder or arson case. It may require sifting through the dust, ashes, and remains of the physical body and the social and psychological mind; uncovering clues that can lead to a life of less pain, of greater fulfillment. Detectives don’t solve every case they take on, and I certainly can’t help every person who consults me. But I sure as hell try to.” In such chapters as “Musculoskeletal Pain, Stress, Wound Healing, and Mind-Body Relationships: A New Perspective,” “Elbow Grease,” “Children of the Bottle: Alcohol and Other Pain Risk Factors,” “Clenched Fists: Posttraumatic Stress and Fear,” and “Wrapping Up: Pain, Disability, Society, and the Individual,” Dr. Finestone gets to the root of the problem, offering relief for those aches and pains you thought would never go away, both mental and physical. “I hope that these stories will inspire some to take charge of their health and pain issues,” he explains in the book. “Everyone knows that is not easy to do. But it is worth it and it can be done.”

HENRY ROLLINS: OCCUPANTS

Thursday, October 13, BookCourt, 163 Court St. between Dean & Pacific Sts, free, 718-875-3677, 7:00
Friday, October 14, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. between Lafayette & Mulberry Sts., free, 7:00
www.henryrollins.com

Henry Rollins speaks his mind. For more than thirty years, the DC-born Rollins has been letting loose his anger at the world in the seminal punk groups Black Flag and Rollins Band, on spoken-word tours, on his IFC series The Henry Rollins Show, in self-published books, and on his current KCRW radio gig. He has seen a lot while traveling around the world, either on his own or with the USO, notebook and camera at the ready. “In my life, I have sought to bridge the gap I have felt between myself and the world,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, the coffee-table-size Occupants (Chicago Review Press, October 1, 2011, $35). “I would hate to think that my understanding of life is derived in part from what I have not seen. While one cannot possibly see everything, I think the more one sees, the better.” Occupants consists of more than eighty color photographs taken since 2003 in such countries as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Mali, Russia, Thailand, and Vietnam, each one accompanied by conceptual text by Rollins, in the first or second person, in which he abstractly rails about fear, terrorism, AIDS, poverty, capitalism, hunger, genocide, and the struggle for peace, letting the photograph take his mind to new places, thoughts, and ideas. “The search for serenity only makes the scars scream louder,” he writes next to a picture of a praying monk in Burma. The photographs themselves are striking, from a lone boy in a parched landscape in Mali to opulent rooms in Saudi Arabia, from a man missing a limb crawling along a Thailand street to children behind a fence in Cambodia, from a military guard in front of a public photo of Mao in China to a grassy field where a house once stood in New Orleans. Rollins devotes a special section near the end to Bhopal, where he went to experience the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fatal gas explosion in 1984; he snuck into the Union Carbide factory there, capturing powerful images of the disaster that in many ways still embodies the ongoing battle between corporations and people. The book concludes with captions that specifically describe each of the photos, although even then Rollins can’t hold back his anger. “I hope it burns to the ground,” he writes under a picture of a Ronald McDonald statue in Thailand. Rollins will be at BookCourt in Brooklyn on October 13 to discuss and sign Occupants, then will be at McNally Jackson on October 14 speaking with Thurston Moore. “That should be good,” Rollins notes on his website. “He’s an interesting person.” And so is Rollins, of course.

OPENHOUSENEWYORK WEEKEND

Thousands of New Yorkers will tour such architectural wonders as the High Line during openhousenewyork weekend (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Multiple venues in all five boroughs
Saturday, October 15, and Sunday, October 16
Admission: free (advance reservations required for some sites)
OHNY Passport: $150
212-991-OHNY
www.ohny.org

For the ninth year, hundreds of architectural sites around the city will open their doors, offering free tours of their unique spaces during openhousenewyork weekend. This Saturday and Sunday, religious institutions, museums, train stations, parks, farmhouses, hotels, cemeteries, hotels, international cultural centers, shipyards, well-known buildings, and little-known treasures will welcome thousands of visitors to spaces either not generally open to the public or not usually looked at in quite this way. Some of the events require advance reservations, and with a $150 Passport you can jump to the front of what should be some very long lines. Among the myriad participating locations are the African Burial Ground, the AVAC System on Roosevelt Island, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park construction site, the Gowanus Canal (by canoe), the Old Croton Aqueduct, Mount Morris Park, the High Line, the Gatehouse, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, the Bartow-Pell Mansion, the Chrysler Building, Melrose Commons, Wave Hill, the Mark Morris Dance Center, the Old Stone House, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, the Noble Maritime Collection, and many more. Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to see some very cool sites, so we can’t recommend this highly enough. There will also be scavenger hunts, kids activities, ghost and manhole cover tours, art walks, opendialogue talks, and other special events. Just be sure to read the details about each venue before you go, since not all of them are open both days, and some are already booked. Keep checking the online schedule as well because there are regular updates and changes in addition to web exclusives.

NEW YORK COMIC CON / NEW YORK ANIME FESTIVAL

Comic Con will team up with the New York Anime Festival this weekend at the Javits Center (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Jacob K. Javits Convention Center
655 West 34th St. (11th Ave. between 34th & 39th Sts.)
October 13-16
Friday Pass $35, Saturday Pass $45 (sold out), Sunday Pass $35, three-day pass $65, four-day pass $85
www.newyorkcomiccon.com

New York Comic Con and the New York Anime Festival arrive in town this week, continuing to grow in its sixth year after nearly one hundred thousand people showed up in 2010. Expanded to four days, this year’s festival features such special guests as actors and comedians Judah Friedlander, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, David Cross, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes, Eliza Dushku, Chris Elliot, Maggie Q, Mark Hamill, Patton Oswalt, Seth Meyers, James Marsters, Kristen Schaal, Seth Green, and Rose McGowan and such comic-book writers, artists, and graphic novelists as Robert Kirkman, Frank Miller, Garth Ennis, Joe Kubert, Joe Simon, Neal Adams, David Mazzucchelli, Tara McPherson, Ron English, Tom Morello, and Stan Lee. Saturday is already sold out, but you can still get a four-day pass in addition to day passes on Friday and Sunday. After October 11, prices on all tickets go up, so get yours now. Below are just some of the many highlights of this terrifically geeky nerd-fest.

Thursday, October 13
NYCC Kick-Off Concert with Headliner DJ Z-Trip and Tom Morello as the Nightwatchman, IGN Theater, 7:30 (VIP and four-day passes only)

Friday, October 14
Robot Chicken, with Doug Goldstein, Matthew Seinrich, Seth Green, and Zeb Wells, IGN Theater, 5:15

Jay & Silent Bob Get Old Live Podcast, IGN Theater, 7:00 (additional $10-$35 tickets needed for entry)

Charity Comic Art Auction benefiting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Room 1B03, 7:45-9:45

Saturday, October 15
Nikita Special Video Presentation and Q&A, with Lyndsy Fonseca, Shane West, and Maggie Q, IGN Theater, 2:45

AMC’s The Walking Dead, with Robert Kirkman, IGN Theater, 5:15

Marvel Studios: Marvel’s The Avengers, with Chris Evans, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Feige, and Tom Hiddleston, IGN Theater, 6:30

MTV Presents Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butt-Head, with Mike Judge, MTV Theater, Room 1A10, 7:30

Tell Your Friends! The Live Show! with Christian Finnegan, Janeane Garofalo, Kristen Schaal, Liam McEeaney, and Rob Paravonian, Room 1A02, 9:00

Sunday, October 16
Conan Spotlight with Jason Momoa, Stephen Lang, and Rose McGowan, Romm 1A22, 10:00 am

IFC’S Portlandia and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, with Carrie Brownstein, David Cross, Fred Armisen, H.Jon Benjamin , and Seth Meyers, MTV Theater, Room 1A10, 11:00 am

CROSSING THE LINE: RACHID OURAMDANE

Rachid Ouramdane will explore political ideology and torture in two presentations at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival (photo © Patrick Imbert)

New York Live Arts
Bessie Schönberg Theater
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
ORDINARY WITNESSES: Tuesday, October 11, $24-$30, 6:30, and Wednesday, October 12, $15, 7:30
WORLD FAIR: Thursday, October 14, and Friday, October 15, $24-$30, 7:30
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.rachidouramdane.com

Paris-based dancer-choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, who founded the L’A company in 2007, will be presenting a pair of fascinating programs at New York Live Arts as part of the “Endurance/Resistance/Inspiration” section of the French Institute Alliance Française’s fifth annual Crossing the Line Festival. On October 11 & 12, Ordinary Witnesses examines torture, memory, and identity in a violent world. Ouramdane, who interviewed victims of torture in putting together the evening-length piece, writes that Ordinary Witnesses takes place “at the edges of civilization and the gateways to barbarity. The instant where people exit humanity to be cast into the jaws of torture.” He continues, “Doing a portrait of people who lived through torture is an attempt to depict the unpresentable. . . . It is about trying to grasp the imagination of those who experienced such atrocities, so that this experience does not remain hushed up. It is also about awareness of history’s repeated violence now that torture seems to be tolerated and even legitimate at the very core of our democracies.” Ouramdane will give a preshow talk on October 11 and participate in a conversation with the PEN American Center’s Larry Siems following the October 12 show. On October 14 & 15, Ouramdane will stage World Fair, an exploration of the human body as it relates to social and political ideology, performed by Ouramdane and multi-instrumentalist Jean-Baptiste Julien, with an artist talk following the October 14 show.

Rachid Ouramdane’s ORDINARY WITNESSES offers an extraordinary look at torture

Update: The son of an Algerian father who was tortured, Rachid Ouramdane has been making the sociopolitical physical in such works as Cover, Discreet Death, and Far . . . , examining memory and identity through multimedia presentations involving progressive movement. On October 11 he and his Paris-based L’A company performed the mesmerizing Ordinary Witnesses at New York Live Arts, part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line interdisciplinary international arts festival. The show begins with a man’s voice detailing his emotions — or lack thereof — as he describes his reaction to having been the victim of torture. He speaks in French, his words translated on the back wall. After several minutes, Lora Juodkaite, Mille Lundt, Jean-Claude Nelson, Georgina Vila-Bruch, and Jean-Baptiste André emerge onto Sylvain Giraudeau’s dark, bare stage, their faces blank as they walk slowly around a rectangular video frame lying flat on the floor and, in one corner, a grid of sixty spotlights that go on and off at various intervals and at different levels of brightness (at times evoking interrogation lights). The dancers occasionally stop, fall to the floor, adopt yogalike poses, and then move on as Jean-Baptiste Julien’s subtle electronic score, including the low buzz of feedback from an onstage electric guitar, hovers ominously above them. At one point a female dancer breaks into a nearly endless twirl, spinning around and around in a dizzying display of agility and sheer breathlessness; watching her, one wonders just how long she can continue, the audience wanting to call out and stop the torture but too amazed to do so. Although it does get repetitive and goes on slightly too long — perhaps echoing the repetitiveness of torture itself — Ordinary Witnesses is an emotionally powerful work that makes its purposes very clear, right from the start. There are still tickets left for the second and final performance on October 12, which will be followed by a discussion between Ouramdane and Larry Siems. Ouramdane will also be presenting his solo work, World Fair, at New York Live Arts October 14-15.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL SPECIAL EVENTS: 10th ANNIVERSARY SCREENING OF THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

The cast and crew of THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS will celebrate the film’s tenth anniversary at the New York Film Festival this week

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson, 2001)
Alice Tully Hall
1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Thursday, October 13, $24, 8:30
Festival runs through October 16
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

In his hysterical 2001 black comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, eclectic indie auteur Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox) created one of the kings of dysfunctional film families. Directly inspired by J. D. Salinger’s Glass clan (Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam), the Tenenbaums of New York City have more than their fair share of distress. After being kicked out of the house for being a lousy father and husband, Royal (Gene Hackman) returns, claiming he is dying of stomach cancer. His wife, noted archaeologist Etheline (Anjelica Huston), is now seeing her accountant, the straitlaced Henry Sherman (Danny Glover). Finance wiz Chas (Ben Stiller) is having difficulty getting over his wife’s death in a plane crash, becoming absurdly overprotective of his two young sons’ (Grant Rosenmeyer and Jonah Meyerson) safety. Tennis prodigy Richie (Luke Wilson) is recovering from a very public breakdown and soon has to admit to himself that he is madly in love with his adopted playwright sister, Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is married to strange neurologist Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray) and having an affair with longtime family friend and Western novelist Eli Cash (cowriter Owen Wilson). Narrated by Alec Baldwin, The Royal Tenenbaums completed an impressive opening hat trick from Anderson, who had previously made Bottle Rocket (1996) and Rushmore (1998). The marvelously funny flick — which had its premiere at the 2001 New York Film Festival — is having a special tenth-anniversary screening October 13 at the forty-ninth annual New York Film Festival, followed by a discussion with the cast and crew, including Anderson and many of the stars. Additional tickets have just been released, but you better act fast if you want to see this unique event.