Oh, the Weekend. Right.

Saturday, May 10

• Go to the myspace page of Her Space Holiday, listen to their covers of Wolf Parade and Buddy Holly (particularly the rockabilly ba-da-da of the latter, "Not Fade Away," which is adolescent and happy in a way that translates the exuberance of the original really well), and tell me you don't want to see them at Knitting Factory tonight.
• Today's the last day to catch Pierrot le fou at Film Forum's Godard's 60s series. You should catch it, because Pierrot le fou rules hard.

• British Sea Power can be pretty fey, what with the jangly guitars and boy's-own-adventure set of references, but in a fun way — and they can also get swirling and bipolar and darkly exciting. Their new record, Do You Like Rock Music?, strikes a fine balance, as you can see for yourself when they play at the Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight.
• MoMA is currently saluting the former sailor and painterly landscape filmmaker Peter Hutton. His recent At Sea is a monumental document, made over three years, of the construction, breaking, and first voyage of a container ship.

The L Magazine Presents Summerscreen

For the third year running, The L Magazine presents Summerscreen, our free outdoor summer film series in Williamsburg/Greenpoint's McCarren Park Pool, every Tuesday night from July 8-August 26, at around sundown.

I shouldn't, I don't think, have to sell you on the powerful awesomeness of spending a summer night outdoors watching a fun movie with a couple thousand of your closest friends, so let's just get to this year's lineup:


Read more

Presenting Yourlocal.com

Apparently print media is dying, which I would imagine would be kind of a panic scenario for those of you who rely upon The L's exhaustive, savvy event listings and our take on the culture and institutions of New York on a local level.

But fear not! Now there is YourLocal, a new social-network website that's actually about, you know, social networking: you take the L's  NYC event listings (or add your own), and build up your own personal interwebnet of friends, and a personal matrix of the concerts, bars, shops, art galleries, readings, markets, and so on, that make up your, well, local life. (People Who Live Otherwhere Than New York: Fear not, YourLocal will soon spread like kudzu 'round our great nation, with foundation content provided by similarly inclined alt-weeklies from a number of other cities. Though of course we rely on You, the User, to make YourLocal look like... your local.)

So come join us at YourLocal and do up your New York all web 2.0 style. We're waiting for you, with a tray of cookies and a kettle on in case you want some tea, we have a number of different kinds of tea as well as milk, sugar, honey and lemon juice I think somewhere in the fridge if you take your tea with lemon, do you we don't remember we're sorry, if you're hungry we can make you a sandwich do you want a sandwich?

Superhero Fashion at the Met

If you were to go home and sew a cartoon superhero outfit with fabric and thread, inspired by the strange and impossibly flawless costumes that they wear, like this:


it would probably come out something like this:



But when real fashion people and costume designers work hard and draw inspiration from "the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian" because "Constantly redefined and reworked according to popular canons of beauty, superheroes embody the superlative" their costumes usually turn out much better. Like this:


Or like comics-inspired haute couture. Thus, Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features "movie costumes, avant-garde haute couture, and high-performance sportswear... reveal[ing] how the superhero serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion and its ability to empower and transform the human body." It'll be up for the next month and a half, until June 22. Check it out before it's gone (pay what you wish to enter).

Critical Mass Brooklyn

Reminder: It's not pretty out, but it's still Bike Month, and Critical Mass Brooklyn is still riding this evening from Grand Army Plaza (and from the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge) in their unending celebration of bikes, biking, not using cars, and bike-and-car harmony. It starts at 7pm, and it's always free.

Stevie Nicks 4 Ever

Hey friends, tonight's highlight is the kind of event that restores your faith in the beautiful craziness of the human species. Think of your favorite Fleetwood Mac star, think about her some more, then drape yourself in swishing fabrics, close your eyes, wear crazy bangly jewelry, find the weirdest, flowiest most romantically gothic accessories you can, and staple them to your outfit, hair and bangly jewelry, and raise a tambourine at the Night of a Thousand Stevies, the greatest Stevie Nicks fan-tribute event in the history of the world. More than one thousand Stevie-lovers get together and put on a night of adoration and music.

They say this:

Neither a contest nor a karaoke show, NOTS is a riot of shawls, lace, baby's breath, twirling, tambourines and great performance.

Glamour In Black And Blue, Capes, Cloaks And Enchanted Eveningwear, Eye Makeup Dark And Careless, Hand-Held Decorated Birds, Stevie Nicks Boot Fetish (All Summer Long), Black Glitter Tambourines, Coq Feathers And Cokespoons, Midnight Blue Velvet, Moonstone Amulets, Lindsey Or John McVie Prince Of Darkness Interpretations, Victorian Mourning Hankies or Black Chiffon Wings.

And the summer became the fall
I was not ready for the winter
It makes no difference at all
cause I wear boots all summer long

The New York Polish Film Festival

Once and future super-commenter George Krzewski is this blog's foremost expert on any number of esoteric topics, Polish cinema chief among them. Coincidentally, this weekend, Anthology Film Archives hosts the fourth annual New York Polish Film Festival. Take it away...

Ok guys, here it is: The Fourth Annual New York Polish Film Festival kicks off today at one of our (my?) favorite places in New York, Anthology Film Archives. The festival runs into next Tuesday, and every day promises to deliver some great movies. This year's highlights include Andrzej Wajda's Katyn (an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film) and Andrzej Jakimowski's Sztuczki (Tricks), which made some waves on the festival circuit last year, including awards at Tokyo, Venice, and the Polish Film Fest in Gdynia (Poland's most prestigious festival). Each screening will be preceded by a short film or documentary, including Francesco Carrozzini's Wierszalin, a behind-the-scenes look at the titular experimental theater group last seen here in NYC in 2005, at La Mama.


Read more

The Sprout Film Festival

Here’s guest contributor Becky Ohlsen with a preview of an under-the-radar film event taking place this weekend.

Here's something you might not think about too often and probably won't see in any summer blockbusters: the subtleties of a romance between two guys with Down's syndrome. As evoked by Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Shira Avni in her short film John and Michael, the relationship is playful and tender, with lots of giggling. Avni animates the story in clay on backlit glass panels; it looks like a daguerrotype-fingerpainting hybrid, full of movement and flickering brown shadows.

Avni's animated short is part of the Sprout Film Festival, a weekend showcase of films related to people with developmental disabilities. The films — documentaries, shorts and features from Germany, Finland, Australia, the UK and across the US — show people with disabilities like autism and Down's syndrome navigating ordinary, everyday experiences: finding jobs and apartments, getting married, making art, flirting on the subway.


Read more

Demystifying the Magic of Recycling

In my mind, recycling goes like this: a truck comes to pick up the bags I leave on the curb, then takes them to a big factory with a giant door. The giant door opens, and a big shovel scoops up all the bags of recycled things and tosses them into the building, which is basically a giant oven, and all the plastics melt down into a big pool of liquid plastic that runs out the back of the factory, where people are reaching into the liquid plastic to make new plastic bottles, the end.

But actually, Slate walks us through it:

When loads of plastic are dumped on a recycling facility's floor, the sorting fun begins. Workers often start by picking through the piles in search of obviously discordant items—kiddie play sets, lawn furniture, clothing mannequins. They also scan for plastic mounds that are drenched in nonrecyclable trash, such as food slurries or medical waste. While a little caked-on tomato sauce isn't going to ruin a batch of PET bottles, a Dumpster's worth of nonrecyclable garbage will; if a large apartment building was careless about separating its rubbish, then hundreds of pounds of plastics may have to be sent to the landfill. According to a 2005 Environmental Protection Agency study in the Pacific Northwest, 24 percent of plastic bottles were rejected as too contaminated for recycling.

The New Yorker Reader: "A Man Like Him," by Yiyun Li

Online here.

Something I might be projecting onto the story but which I nonetheless find interesting is the parallel Li seems to be making between the respective bullying groupthink community politics of China and, well, much of the internet.

On the one hand there's a guy whose nineteen-year-old daughter starts a blog chronicling her attempts to sue and harass him after he divorces her mother — all the commenters line up behind her, and dissenting voices are shouted down or their comments deleted — and on the other hand there's the main character's father, an intellectual who was denounced and given a job as a toilet cleaner for his "reactionary" politics. In both cases, there's a pile-on, facts are less important than the momentum of the discussion, and their persecutors get to feel righteous and triumphant.

I've been thinking, lately, about how Mao — both in the initial revolution and then with all his campaigns, especially the Cultural Revolution — knew how to get the Chinese people behind him: harness their resentments, basically. You hear about peasants, during the initial land reforms, tying up their landlords and employers (even ones they had good relationships with) and humiliating and torturing them and stripping them of everything; during the Cultural Revolution students went after their teachers for not being sufficiently fervent; et cetera et cetera. It wasn't a state of constant revolution or vigilance or whatever — it was a cynical way of governing an ungovernable country (vast in geography and population and varied in demographics and customs; that much of the country was uneducated probably made it more so, while also making Mao's strategies more effective).

I think, really, of undirected underclass resentment whenever I hear people in the comments section spout phrases like "Mainstream Media," to describe people in better-connected channels of dialogue. And I think of it how it's possible for this resentment to be manipulated, by people who don't really respect the intelligence of the people whose resentment they're manipulating, into something like frothing subservience. I think about this especially when I read about Nick Denton encouraging Gawker commenters to share dirt, theoretically to overthrow the old-media model while exposeing its secrets, but mostly because advertisers pay per page view.

It's a cultural revolution!

Attention Car-Owning Puzzlers!

If you've got a few hours to burn, check out this mind-churner from AAA. Not only does it whet your wits, it gives you helpful tips about gas, gas prices, gas burning, cars, fuel, fuel economy, and tires.

It's always a good idea to make fun of the good-intentioned free things that the service that has saved me and my car so many times provides, right? Sharpen your pencils. Also, when you type in your answers, it won't let you delete, so type carefully, and goodbye, I will certainly get hit by a car later.

I have no idea what it is I'm supposed to do. Please advise.

Clinic's new album Do It! will probably fly mostly under the record this year because, with very few elite exceptions, we tend to value bands we haven't ever heard of that do things we haven't heard done before (at least not very much) more than we value bands we like having around for doing their thing well. And this is arguably too bad, but then again Clinic's got a pretty good career going so whatever. Show your appreciation by giving the fuzzy, stompy, world-stew hash party Do It! a few listens (it's one of their stronger and more bracing efforts, I think, just song-by-song), and maybe by seeing the psych-popping Scousers give the back catalogue a spin tonight at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Tonight's show, incidentally, is also an opportunity for You to Hear the NYC Band Violens, convenient as they're apparently an NYC Band You Need to Hear, so there's that. And personal favorites CaUSE co-MOTION!, who I always say sound like Television Personalities on pogo sticks, because they do.

I Leaf New York

What do you get for the person/mother who has everything except for a cotton bag made out of t-shirts, and is not embarrassed by a little visible self-satisfaction? How about this very cute bag for carrying groceries so you don't use a cloud of ocean-clotting plastic every time.

Sure, we all have hempy public radio tote bags at home that we mean to use, but they are not cute enough. The Tbag is made out of irregular cotton t-shirts, each costs $10 (expensive enough that it feels like you're giving a real present, just cheap enough to buy without thinking, Really? Ten dollars for an irregular white t-shirt sack?), and can be wadded up and carried in a purse or briefcase, in case you find yourself shopping for food before going home to pick up your tote bag. And if you find yourself without a shirt in an emergency, you could put a slit in the bottom and wear it as a tank top.

Pretty Pictures

Starting tomorrow night, and continuing through May 20, BAM is spotlighting the cinematographer Ed Lachman, who to judge from his credits is something of a master collaborator — with filmmakers, and with stories. The same guy's responsible for (just to pull from the BAM series) Susan Seidelman's graffiti-hued downtown 85 pop fantasia Desperately Seeking Susan (screening 5/14), Todd Haynes's glossy, swoony Sirk pastiche Far From Heaven (5/17), Sofia Coppola's gauzy adolescent reverie The Virgin Suicides (5/18), and so on and so on, with Werner Herzog and Paul Schrader and Ulrich Seidel and David Byrne. Things kick off tomorrow with Ken Park; Lachman will be on hand for a Q&A following the semi-notorious, um, teen movie he codirected with Larry Clark.

Tonight, meanwhile, is the last night that BAM is showing Wong Kar-wai's debut As Tears Go By (a movie marvelously, cheesily in love with Hong Kong gangster movies, pop music, beautiful young movie stars, and music video cinematography — just like all Wong's movies, but so much more fresher-faced and adorable). Catch it tonight, or at Cinema Village starting tomorrow.

Out Now: The L Magazine's Photo Issue

A special issue of the L this week as we present our annual Photo Issue, this year spotlighting seven photographers living and working in New York.

Pick it up, or check online for Andrew Boyle's faces in a crowd, Sam Horine's crumbling Brooklyn waterfront (he also took the cover shot), Christopher Benton's deadpan automobiles of Sunnyside, Queens, Justine Benith's curious girls, Shane Lutjens's Minnesota, Rhea Karam's retail chronicles, and Meg Wachter's abandoned Catholic school.

Plus Michael Joshua Rowin on the radical cinema of the 1960s, and all the listings you've come to know and love and rely upon and shake in withdrawal from.

Art Fag City: Just Pretty, Naked and On Drugs? Ryan McGinley's "I Know Where Summer Goes" photo exhibition at Team Gallery

Here's an online-exclusive edition of Art Fag City, from our art critic Paddy Johnson. (NB: The exhibition she reviews is viewable here, in case you immediately want to see these attractive naked people she's talking about.)

Ryan McGinley’s critics describe the narrative behind his photographs like this: “My friends are pretty. We get naked in the country. Usually there are drugs. Rad! Subversive!” That his 30-plus photographs of nudes in undeveloped landscapes, currently on display at Team Gallery, might be as vapid as the lifestyle they depict certainly holds weight as a criticism, even if McGinley’s acclaim comes from his ability to transcend the documentary youth culture genre. Earlier photographs — including a picture of a young man riding his bike taken from above in 2000, a 2004 image of a nude woman sipping a drink from a straw in the back of a moving truck, and a number of silhouetted figures captured in the midst of falling — evade the accusations of overly narcissistic photography frequently attached to like-minded photographer Nan Goldin, and at least some of the moral depravity for which Larry Clark has been criticized. At their best, McGinley’s flat, unassuming representations of friends and models exhibit a rare honesty and uniqueness, arguably expanding the lexicon of gay photography. (Read the rest of the article here.)

The L Mag's New Music Festival, June 5

You read about it in last week's magazine, you dreamed about it when you slept, you shaped your food into letters that spelled it out, and now it's time to buy your tickets to it.

The L's New Music Festival is happening in less than a month, on Thursday, June 5th, at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and tickets are merely $8 in advance, $10 at the door. The lineup has a bunch of bands from our Eight NYC Bands You Need to Hear issue, plus a couple of our honorable mentions. Here's the roster:

The Lisps
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Famous Amos
La Strada
Meowskers
Motel Motel

Screening Log: The Guatemalan Handshake (Todd Rohal, 2006)

Coming on like David Gordon Green with Tourette's (and I suspect you now know whether or not you will ever see this movie), The Guatemalan Handshake is set in some lovely lost rural America, shot in a widescreen frame with an appreciation for stillness — preparing the grounds about equally for transcendence, deadpan, and outbursts of quirk.

To outline the plot is to suggest a bit of both: the movie's narrated by a young girl named Turkeylegs who hangs out at the house of the elderly Mr. Turnupseed, father of her only friend, twentysomething Donald (Will Oldham), who wanders off at the beginning of the movie (having borrowed his dad's beloved red, triangular car), leaving them and his pregnant girlfriend in the lurch. There's a roller rink and a demolition derby, flickering lights and a lost dog.

The supporting cast, which seems designed around childhood-memory caricatures of small-town oddballs, twitches and sputters; the whole thing sometimes feels like a not particularly interesting indiewood quirk show, but Rohal manages a tone of vague melancholy (and a few laugh-out-loud offhand bits), and it's possible to see all the weirdness as an honest, sideways grasp at magic. I've never seen anything quite like the moment when the white-haired Ms. Ethel Firecracker, sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper by the morning sun out the window at her back, lets out a small "Oh!", and Rohal cuts to close-up of her own obituary. (The obituary, wonderfully, lists the cause of her death as simply, "complications.")

The Guatemalan Handshake is available on a gorgeous 2-disc DVD from the new label Benten Films, run by the critics Aaron Hillis and Andrew Grant; Benten's also released DVDs of American independent films by Joe Swanburg and (director-to-watch) Aaron Katz. (The progression on Benten's spine numbers — from digital D.I.Y. and improvised dialogue to off-the-cuff eloquence to careful cinematography and longer-gestating scripts and storyboards — seems to mirror the career trajectory of the directors and movement they feature.)

Street Stories NYC

This is contributor Jessica Hall's weekly column (that usually gets posted on Monday, but because of a glitch that was my, Edith's, fault, it's going up today) in which she interviews the homeless and street people she meets around the city. This week she spoke with J, 60, who she met one afternoon in Tompkins Square Park.

I was talking to a young woman whose husband had a tattooed face, to see if I could interview them, and J came and sat beside us. "I guess I don't merit being interviewed," he said. "Sure you do," I told him. Incidentally, J said that he used to volunteer for the coalition for the homeless, years ago, and that he created their protocol for dealing with the press.

Where are you from?

Peoria, Illinois. I hitchhiked to New York City in 1966. I was on my way to Paris. I was 17 and they said that I couldn’t without my parents’ permission. I wasn’t dejoure emancipated, but I was defacto emancipated [Ed.: Dejoure?]. I even had a car. I was just restoring it at the time. It was an old Porsche.

Do you know who Nellie Bly is? A female journalist. You kinda remind me of her.
What else do you want to know?

Where did you first stay when you came here?

The only people I knew in New York were at Columbia University. I was hanging around the Columbia quad and my two friends were women. They stayed at the Barnard dorm. They used to sneak me in—I actually climbed in through the bathroom window.

When I first left the mid-west I was in my Kerouac ‘On the Road’ period.

I just read that.

No you didn’t. What you read was the crap-attack, sanitized, edited-out version.



(More...)

MIXER: Marrying Music and Literature for the Past One Year and One Month

This month's MIXER reading series, combining good music and good literature, isn't messing around--they've got a Pulitzer winner, a MacArthur winner, a mostly unknown poet, and a band with that Pulitzer winner on guitar and percussion. Nice work, MIXER.

The readers are:

Jonathan Lethem: Brooklyn novelist, MacArthur Genius. Answer to many Brooklyn trivia questions.
Paul Muldoon: Irish-born Pulitzer-winning poet and poetry editor of The New Yorker. Chill dude, rad friend.
Craig Morgan Teicher: Unknown poet, will have a book out in 2010.

Rackett: With Muldoon on lyrics, guitar, and percussion. Muldoon describes the band as "When Irving Berlin meets blues and boogie-woogie, or Cole Porter meets prog and punk, or Ira Gershwin glam and grunge." Which makes no sense to me, and calls to mind no music that I can imagine, but it should be interesting.

Q: To Which Swedish Singer-Songwriters Are "The Kids" Listening These Days? A:

So now I'm going to mention two sold-out shows that're happening tonight (at Joe's Pub) and tomorrow night (at Bowery Ballroom) because who knows you might get in and also you should know about these things: El Perro Del Mar, the mournful Swedish singer-songwriter who sings sad songs over soft-focus neo-girl-group production, is on tour with her 22-year-old countrywoman Lykke Li, who aces the same myspace test recently passed by Lily Allen and Kate Nash: one visit and you're hooked. Both, as it turns out, have new material out: El Perro's second record is moodier than her debut but still the kind of thing you want to curl up inside to keep warm; Lykke Li's first official U.S. release (an EP, following lots of attention for appearing at SXSW and for having Bjorn of Peter Bjorn and John produce her forthcoming-here debut) is definitely crushworthy, and you should expect to hear quite a bit of "Little Bit" (and, I would hope, "I'm Good, I'm Gone") at whatever hip parties you attend this summer.