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

CONNECTED: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ABOUT LOVE, DEATH & TECHNOLOGY

CONNECTED tells the intimate story of a father and a daughter and modern technology

CONNECTED: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ABOUT LOVE, DEATH & TECHNOLOGY (Tiffany Shlain, 2011)
Angelika Film Center
18 West Houston St. at Mercer St.
Opens Friday, October 14
212-995-2570
www.angelikafilmcenter.com
www.connectedthefilm.com

After working for two years on a film about global interdependence and connectedness in the internet age, award-winning documentarian Tiffany Shlain (Yelp: With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, The Tribe, Less Is Moore) realized that she did not feel connected to her material. So she turned inward, deciding to instead focus her camera on her close relationship with her father, Leonard Shlain, a successful surgeon and author of such books as The Alphabet vs. the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image and Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. In an ironic twist of fate, Dr. Shlain, whose writings examined the different functions of the left and right brain in humans, was diagnosed with brain cancer. At the same time, his daughter, after five miscarriages, was desperately trying to make one final attempt to get pregnant as her forties approached. (She already had a daughter with her husband, Ken Goldberg.) This life-and-death dichotomy lies at the heart of Tiffany Shlain’s moving, deeply personal story, exactingly told in her feature-length debut, Connected. Shlain includes scenes from her original concept, highly illustrative and scientific examinations of the human species’ growing addiction to computers and cell phones, narrated by Peter Coyote, alongside animation, archival footage, lots of Harold Lloyd clips, and home movies, holding nothing back as she shares intensely personal details about her family and herself. While the idea that technology has given humans the ability to become more connected around the world is nothing new, Shlain’s intimate exploration is affecting nonetheless. Founder of the Webby Awards, Shlain, who currently observes a technology Shabbat, turning off all electronic equipment every Saturday, has organized a series of special events at the Angelika, where Connected is scheduled to run October 14-20, with Q&As following select screenings nearly every day. Among the participants who will be looking at various aspects of technology and culture are Todd Oldham and Anna Deavere Smith (October 14, 7:15), Jennie Livingston (October 15, 4:40), Reboot, Jumpstart, Natan, and Heeb magazine (October 15, 7:15), Rachel Sklar (October 16, 7:15), Peter Crosby (October 17, 4:40), Ted Hope (October 19, 4:40), Paul Levinson (October 19, 7:15), and Benjamin Barber (October 20, 7:15).

CLOUD GATE DANCE THEATRE OF TAIWAN: WATER STAINS ON THE WALL

Cloud Gate Dance Theatre returns to BAM with WATER STAINS ON THE WALL (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)

BAM Next Wave Festival
Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 12-15, $16-$50, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.cloudgate.org

Since 1973, company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre have been presenting elegant, exquisitely choreographed shows centered around meditative movement inspired by Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and ancient culture, incorporating traditional, contemporary, and classical dance in mesmerizing ways. The company has been appearing at BAM’s Next Wave Festival since 1995, in such elegant productions as Moon Water and Wild Cursive. This week they’re back in Brooklyn with the international premiere of Water Stains on the Wall, a seventy-minute multimedia work that explores Chinese calligraphy, with music by Toshio Hosokawa, lighting design by Lulu W. L. Lee, projections by Ethan Wang, costumes by Lin Ching-ju, and set design and choreography by Lin. Lin will also give an Iconic Artist Talk on Thursday night at BAM Rose Cinemas at 6:00 ($20), moderated by Rachel Cooper, as part of BAM’s 150th anniversary celebration.

Dancers appear to float on clouds in WATER STAINS ON THE WALL (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)

Update: On a slightly tilted white stage resembling Japanese rice paper, sixteen dancers slowly move about, sometimes in unison, sometimes individually, as black and gray inky, shadowy splotches drift across the floor like clouds. All of the dancers but one exit, leaving Su I-Ping to perform a brief solo, soon joined by Yang I-Chun. Through a prologue and seven sections over the course of seventy minutes, dancers slowly come and go, at times breaking out into smooth, fluid movements, waving their arms, lifting their legs, almost as if they are calligraphic letters come to life. Identically garbed in diaphanous, translucent, floor-length billowing pants and either bare-chested (seven men) or in flesh-colored leotards (nine women), the performers never once come into contact with one another, each a single, individual part of the whole, floating on the formations below them — which often evoke memory and the past as much as clouds — as Toshio Hosokawa’s compelling score shifts from electronic noise to minimalist percussion and piano. The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Water Stains on the Wall, inspired by a legendary Tang Dynasty tale about calligraphy, is another breathtaking presentation from one of that country’s most popular companies, which has been bringing their mesmerizing works to BAM’s Next Wave Festival since 1995. “Brooklyn in late autumn can be freezing and wet, especially in comparison to Taipei,” company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min explains in a program note, “but to all of us in Cloud Gate — BAM is a center of warmth.”

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