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

MoMA PRESENTS: JOHN AKOMFRAH’S THE NINE MUSES

THE NINE MUSES is an elegiac look at the journey and the immigrant experience

THE NINE MUSES (John Akomfrah, 2011)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-12
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.icarusfilms.com

Making ingenious use of footage previously shot for other projects, Ghana-born British filmmaker John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses is a beautiful, elegiac poem about migration and journey, both physical and metaphysical. “Every day is a journey and the journey itself is home” reads a quote from Matsuo Bashō, one of many excerpts that show up as onscreen intertitles or are read by offscreen voices. Divided into sections devoted to the nine muses born to Zeus and Mnemosyne, including Clio (muse of history), Euterpe (muse of music), Melpomene (muse of tragedy), and Thalia (muse of comedy), the film cuts back and forth between footage of men working in a hellish underground foundry, an angry Akomfrah lying down along a waterfront, staring directly into the camera accusatorily, and stunning shots of a vast Alaskan landscape of sea, sky, and mountains with one of a pair of characters in brightly colored parkas looking out at the wide, almost blindingly white expanse. (Composer Trevor Mathison is the Yellow Man, David Lawson the Blue Man). Akomfrah, who cofounded the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982, adds in archival black-and-white film of Africans and Indians arriving on the shore of a post-WWII England while also focusing on various modes of travel, including boats, trains, and planes, poetically edited together by Miikka Leskinen to capture intriguing aspects of the immigrant experience. The narration features such actors as John Barrymore, Richard Burton, Alex Jennings, and Jim Norton reading from such plays and novels as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Homer’s The Odyssey, William Shakespeare’s Richard II and Twelfth Night, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and Molloy, Oedipus’s Sophocles, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with interlude poems by Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Kahlil Gibron, Countee Cullen, William Blake, and Zelda Fitzgerald. There are several live performances, with Leontyne Price singing “Motherless Child” and Paul Robeson singing “Let My People Go”; the score also features music by Arvo Pärt and the Gundecha Brothers. A self-described “Proustian” odyssey, The Nine Muses is a fascinating hybrid of sound and vision, of history and memory, that will be playing October 6-12 at MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater; the October 8 screening at 4:30 will be introduced by Akomfrah and followed by a discussion moderated by Sally Berger.

ART SPIEGELMAN — METAMAUS: IN CONVERSATION WITH HILLARY CHUTE

92nd St. Y Unterberg Poetry Center
1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday, October 6, $27, 8:00
212-415-5500
www.92y.org

Twenty-five years ago, Art Spiegelman revolutionized the comic book industry, as well as Holocaust literature, with the first volume of his epic Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History, followed six years later by And Here My Troubles Began, earning him a special Pulitzer Prize. In celebration of the book’s silver anniversary, the cofounder of the heavily influential Raw magazine (which he edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly) has released the spectacular MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Pantheon, October 4, 2011, $35), which consists of pages from notebooks, sketches, grids, research paraphernalia, photos, letters, family trees, a lengthy transcript of the 1972 interview with his father that formed the basis of Maus’s tale of Vladek’s struggle to survive in Auschwitz during WWII, and much more, filled with fascinating personal insight. “It was hard to revisit Maus, the book that both ‘made’ me and has haunted me ever since; hard to revisit the ghosts of my family, the death-stench of history, and my own past,” Spiegelman writes in the book’s acknowledgment to editor Hillary Chute, whose interviews with Spiegelman are found throughout such chapters as “Why the Holocaust?,” “Why Mice?,” and “Why Comics?” Chute also talks to Mouly and their children, Nadja and Dash, examining the Maus phenomenon from every angle. In addition, the full-color hardcover is accompanied by a CD that contains rough drafts, videos, interviews, the complete Maus strips, a tour of Auschwitz, and other odds and ends relating to the unforgettable story. “I didn’t know that I did want to do a book about the Holocaust,” Spiegelman explains early on. “If anything, I was in allergic reaction to my own Jewishness. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to talk about it as self-hating (even though some people were angry at Maus for my lack of Zionist zeal), but when I was a kid I wasn’t sure being Jewish was such a great idea — I’d heard they killed people for that. Maus somehow involved coming out of the closet as a Jew.” Spiegelman will discuss all that and more at the 92nd St. Y on October 6 when he sits down with Chute for a conversation about the history of Maus, one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL NEVER FORGETS: DENNIS ELSAS

Dennis Elsas will take audience on audiovisual ride through his life and career in radio at 92YTribeca

A MULTIMEDIA JOURNEY THROUGH THE PERSONAL ARCHIVES OF DENNIS ELSAS
92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Tuesday, October 4, $18, 7:00
212-415-5500
www.denniselsas.com
www.92y.org

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, WNEW-FM had one of the all-time-great DJ lineups, with such musical stalwarts and wily veterans as Scott Muni, Dave Herman, Vin Scelsa, Pat St. John, Carol Miller, Pete Fornatale, and Dennis Elsas playing a mix of progressive and classic rock, pop, and folk. Elsas, who can currently be heard on SiriusXM Classic Vinyl and WFUV (along with Scelsa’s “Idiot’s Delight” and Fornatale’s “Mixed Bag”) and teaches the Rock Revolution in Music and Media graduate course at Fordham, will be giving a multimedia lecture on October 4 at 92YTribeca, talking about his musical history, from growing up listening to top-40 radio to being part of the progressive FM movement to interviewing living legends. Even if you don’t know him by name, you’ll recognize that soothing voice as soon as you hear it.

NATIONAL ADOPTION REUNION WITH GAVIN DeGRAW

Gavin DeGraw will be hanging out in Central Park with the animals on October 4, looking to set a Guinness World Record

Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park
Tuesday, October 4, free, 4:00 – 6:30
www.animalalliancenyc.org
www.gavindegraw.com

Gavin DeGraw isn’t about to let the awful attack he suffered in August in the East Village keep him down. The New York-based singer-songwriter behind such singles as “In Love with a Girl,” “We Belong Together,” and “I Don’t Want to Be” and such albums as Chariot (2003), Free (2009), and his latest, Sweeter (RCA, September 2011), is about to set off on a U.S. tour, but first he’ll be playing a free show October 4 at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park. The performance is part of Petco’s National Adoption Reunion, which is attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the Largest Gathering of Adopted Shelter Animals, currently at 250. To participate, just bring your pet (dogs must be on a leash, cats, rabbits, and other animals in a carrier) and proof of adoption from a shelter or rescue organization (the animal cannot have been purchased from a pet store or breeder) to the park at 4:00. There will also be dogs available for adoption on-site. National Adoption Reunion is the centerpiece of the third annual New York Week for the Animals, cosponsored by the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals and which also includes such upcoming events as the New York Audubon Evening Autumn Migration Walk, a birding tour of Bryant Park, the workshop “Trap-Neuter-Return: How to Manage a Feral Cat Colony,” a Dogs Have Angels Too book signing and adoption with Sara Cavallaro, the second annual Anjellicle Cats Rescue Catbaret, the Pup Parade & Blessing of Animals for Veterans, a Creepy Creatures Weekend at the New York Botanical Garden, the second annual 5K Run for the Horses, and other special activities and adoption clinics through October 9.

HILLARY JORDAN: WHEN SHE WOKE

Monday, October 3, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St. between Lafayette & Mulberry Sts., free, 7:00
Wednesday, October 5, BookCourt, 163 Court St. between Pacific & Dean Sts., free, 7:00
www.algonquinbooksblog.com
www.hillaryjordan.com

Brooklyn-based author Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound (Algonquin, 2009), about racial tension in a family on a Mississippi farm in the post-World War II south, was greeted with both honors and sales, winning the 2006 Bellwether Prize as well as a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association and becoming a favorite among reading groups. Two years later, Jordan returns with When She Woke (Algonquin, October 2011, $24.95), a novel set not in the past but the barely removed future, a dystopian America in which Christian fundamentalism, genetic manipulation, and the merging of church and state combine to solve the overcrowding in the penal system by “melachroming” convicted offenders, turning them red, blue, yellow, and green — bringing discrimination based on skin color to a whole new level. “She saw her hands first,” Jordan writes. “She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish. She’d known what to expect — she’d seen Reds many times before, of course, on the street and on the vid — but still, she wasn’t prepared for the sight of her own changed flesh. For the twenty-six years she’d been alive, her hands had been a honey-toned pink, deepening to golden brown in the summertime. Now, they were the color of newly shed blood.” Despite this science-fiction touch, the book hearkens back, quite consciously, to that 1850 classic of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as the trajectory of Jordan’s fallen woman protagonist, Hannah Payne, echoes that of Hester Prynne, both victims of a tortured “man of God” and overwhelming societal hypocrisy. Jordan’s echo of Hawthorne brings to light the Puritan narrative that still lies so close to the surface of an America that continues to struggle with sexuality, gender, crime, and punishment. Akin to and often compared with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jordan’s novel will hit stores October 11, and she’s opening her book tour in New York City this week with two special events, a reading, signing, and conversation with Valerie Martin on October 3 at McNally Jackson in the West Village and a reading, signing, and audience Q&A on October 5 at BookCourt in Cobble Hill.

FIRST SATURDAYS: LATINO HERITAGE

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, October 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating Latino heritage at its October First Saturday program, centered on the exhibition “Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: The Latino List,” in which the photographer behind “The Black List” turns his camera on such Latino figures as Marta Moreno Vega, Pitbull, Eva Longoria, Cesar Conde, Robert Menendez, and John Leguizamo. Greenfield-Sanders will screen the HBO documentary The Latino List at 7:30 and participate in a discussion following the film. The evening will also include live performances by ABAKUÁ Afro-Latin Dance Company, Jerry Hernandez y La Orquesta Dee Jay, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jose Conde, a book-club talk by Moreno Vega about her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo, a curator talk on “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk — An Introspective,” an art workshop, and more. Also on view are such exhibits as “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior,” “Raw/Cooked: Kristof Wickman,” “Eva Hesse Spectres 1960,” “Matthew Buckingham: ‘The Spirit and the Letter,’” “reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” and “Ten Years Later: Ground Zero Remembered.”

THIRTYNOTHING

Dan Fishback looks back at his childhood and the AIDS epidemic in multidisciplinary THIRTYNOTHING at Dixon Place

Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Pl. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Fridays & Saturdays, September 30 – October 22, $15-$20, 7:30 or 9:30
212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org

A few years ago, we caught Dan Fishback’s outrageously funny You Will Experience Silence at Dixon Place, one of the truly great works about Chanukah. Fishback, who has also presented such shows as The Material World, Absentia Dementia, Waiting for Barbara, and Please Let Me Love You, which take on politics, celebrity, religion, gay culture, and other themes, is staging the solo performance project thirtynothing at Dixon Place on Fridays & Saturdays through October 22. Directed by Stephen Brackett, thirtynothing pulls together stories from Fishback’s childhood along with tales from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, weaving in work by such seminal artists as Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz. In conjunction with thirtynothing, Dixon Place will be holding special Sunday conversations ($5 suggested donation, 5:00) on the cultural legacy of AIDS, beginning October 2 with “The Queer Generation Gap” (with Ira Sachs, Jack “Mother Flawless Sabrina” Doroshow, and Carlos Motta) and continuing October 9 with “The Gentrification Age” (with Sarah Schulman), October 16 with “The Films of Mark Morrisroe” (including screenings of Hello from Bertha, The Laziest Girl in Town, and Nymph-O-Maniac), and October 23 with “THIRTYEVERYTHING.” The talks will take place in the lounge, where Fishback has installed a site-specific piece honoring artists who died of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. “There is no ritualized means for my generation to mourn our predecessors who were lost to AIDS,” Fishback explains in an online program note. “As a Jew, trained from birth to mourn the obliteration of my ancestors, I feel the impulse to gather my community together, to speak of the dead, to celebrate the triumphs of the past and integrate that history into a sense of who I am. That is the impulse behind this project.”