Results tagged “bam”

Next Tuesday night BAM will host the Biking Rules PSA Festival, which will be followed by after-party in the BAM lobby with free beer from Brooklyn Brewery. The event is part of Transportation Alternative's initiative to get scofflaw cyclists to follow certain rules, such as giving pedestrians the right of way and obeying traffic lights. (But what about biking with a belly full of free beer?) Earlier this year, the group solicited imaginative PSAs to help promote their Biking Rules, and received submissions from more than 80 artists and filmmakers. Here's one of our favorites:

   

Also this week:

John Cassavetes's wrenching film Opening Night, released in 1977, stars Gena Rowlands as a famous actress who becomes increasingly unhinged after seeing a young autograph hound hit by a car outside the theater where she's starring in a Broadway-bound play. Acclaimed Flemish director Ivo van Hove—whose bold interpretations of plays like Hedda Gabler and The Misanthrope have been hits in NYC—has crafted a large-scale theatrical adaptation of Cassavetes's award-winning film.

Last year the first Takeover BAM went down, and the number one complaint was that it was a bit overcrowded. Hopefully they've worked out some kinks in the past year, because the 2nd one-night-only, all-night open house party is coming up on September 27th.

Swing Vote, anyone? You know, starring Kevin Costner as an “apathetic, beer-slinging, lovable loser, who is coasting through a life that has passed him by, until his daughter sets off a chain of events which culminates in the election coming down to one vote: her dad’s!” HAHAHA! Take it away, Boston Globe: “Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize. It's predicated on so many forces of incompetence converging in a single spot that it feels like farce for dummies. Why are we still microwaving Frank Capra's old casseroles?”

Another jewel in the BAM Cultural district crown has been revealed with the recent announcement that the city-owned Strand Theatre at 647 Fulton Street will be renovated for expanded use by BRIC – the Brooklyn cultural organization that manages Celebrate Brooklyn!, BCAT, and the Rotunda Gallery, among other programs – and UrbanGlass, an educational glassworks group. Both organizations already have facilities at the former theater.

Director David Gordon Green, called "one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic independent filmmakers of the last decade" by The Believer, will be sharing his lyrical take on southern culture with Brooklyn moviegoers starting Thursday, when BAMcinematek kicks off All the Real Americans: The World of David Gordon Green.

In 2004, Mayor Bloomberg agreed to set aside property in Fort Greene for the construction of a $48.5 million, 299-seat classical theater (above) designed by Frank Gehry and Hugh Hardy for Theater for a New Audience. The itinerant company has not had a permanent home since it started in 1979; the glassy new building would be built on city-owned land in Fort Greene opposite the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a planned BAM “Cultural District.”

            

Next week some of the best films from this year's Sundance Festival will unspool at BAM during their third annual Sundance Institute takeover. The ten day mini-fest features 10 dramatic features, 12 documentaries and 36 shorts. Most of these selections screen just once or twice, and not all of them have distribution, so you've got to stay on your toes if there's something you want to see.

Elaine Stritch's long and colorful career is packed with so many memorable roles that it's impossible to really say what she's best known for. Her show-stopping rendition of "Ladies Who Lunch" in Sondheim's Company? Or maybe her Tony-nominated performance in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance? Her movie and television appearances in everything from Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks to 30 Rock? Or her critically-acclaimed solo cabaret show, which she's taken from Broadway to the intimate Cafe Carlyle, just downstairs from her home in the Carlyle Hotel? And this season fans of the incomparable Stritch have another winner to add to their collection: her short but poignant portrayal of Nell in Samuel Beckett's Endgame.

THEATER: We saw Fiona Shaw in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days on Saturday and highly recommend it. Shaw is mesmerizing in her performance as Winnie, crystallizing in her 90-minute virtuoso performance all the desperation, self-delusion and absurdity of an entire lifetime. (Her little-seen costar Tim Potter is also a hoot as Willie.) The production is as bitterly funny as it is affecting, and, as a metaphor, the blasted landscape that devours Winnie is as potent as it was in 1960, when the play was written. In our interview with Fiona Shaw she mentioned talk of a Broadway transfer, but don't take any chances; see it at BAM before it closes on February 2nd. – John Del Signore

The Brooklyn Academy of Music kicked off their fourth season of Eat Drink & Be Literary last night at the BAMcafé. The sold-out event revolved around author George Saunders, a craftsman of absurdly hilarious short story and essays that lovingly lift American consumerism and mass media to surreal heights. His laugh-out-loud short story Pastoralia, for instance, concerns a man and a woman portraying full-time troglodytes in a theme park exhibit. In 2006, Saunders, who has a degree in geophysical engineering, was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant for “bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos, and literary style all his own.”

THEATER: Wolf Lane Productions presents Victims of the Zeitgeist (The Tragedy of Martin Luther King, Jr.), written & directed by Ellwoodson Williams. The production "offers an exciting and telling insight into just who Martin Luther King, Jr., was as leader and simply as a sensitive and intelligent human being who loved life and who had a sense of humor, a deep understanding of the human condition - its strengths and weaknesses - and a profound belief in justice."

In Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, a decidedly upbeat woman named Winnie spends Act One striving valiantly to make the best of her sticky situation: she’s irrevocably buried up to her waist in a “low mound.” True, Winnie has her reticent companion Willie for company, but she cheerily defies the barren void by holding forth for a seemingly nonexistent gathering of spectators. And Act Two finds Winnie still determined to make a go of it, despite a marked deterioration of her condition: she is now buried up to the neck. 47 years after Beckett finished it, the brutally funny and moving Happy Days is now the hot ticket at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

What with Pacific Standard’s North Slope location, their blog, their robot blog, and their faux-formal alternative title (Jon & John's House of Starchy Living and Temperance Den), the Fourth Avenue watering hole seems determined to become the McSweeney’s of bars. Now they’ve taken their clever eccentricity one step further with a Frequent Drinker Card Program, which gives patrons something in return for their consumption beyond inflated self-worth and unwanted pregnancies.

As last night's Iowa caucuses heralded the beginning of the heated drive to presidential nominations and general election, news of Barack Obama's Democratic win and Mike Huckabee's Republican win is naturally front page material. The Daily News and Newsday both take "BAM" as their headlines, though the News focuses on Obama while Newsday offers a split Obama-Huckabee cover.

EVENT: Come feel the love at the hotel QT tonight, as the Love party returns. Get those swimsuits out of storage, because there's a pool! And don't worry, the open vodka bar (8-9) will help you warm up.

After months and months of delays, the BAM Cultural District may be moving forward. The NY Times is reporting that city officials have chosen Harlem-based developer and Brooklyn resident Carlton Brown to create what the Times' Terry Pristin calls the "cultural district's centerpiece." This is the first Brooklyn project for Brown, who developed the Kalahari and 1400 on Fifth in Harlem and the Solaire, the city's first residential green building, in Battery Park City. The...

MOVIE: BAM pays homage to the late Barbara Stanwyck tonight with a screening of Forbidden. The 1932 Frank Capra-directed film (which tells the tale of a librarian who has fallen for an unobtainable/married man) was supposedly influenced by his real-life affair with the leading lady. Critic and historian Elliott Stein will discuss the film after the 6:50 screening. 4:30, 6:50 and 915pm // BAM Rose Cinemas [30 Lafayette Ave., Fort Greene] // $11 Meanwhile, the...

MOVIE: The Brooklyn Independent Cinemas series (which takes place the first and third Monday of every month) delivers two shorts tonight. First up is Nevel is the Devil, where "a supervisor at a consumer product testing lab interrogates two suspects of a devilish prank." The second is The Last Romantic, which follows Calvin Wizzig, a poet, around New York in hopes of getting published. Watch the trailer here. 7pm // Barbes [376 9th St, Park...

Sufjan Keeps it Local We really enjoyed Sufjan's BQE show last Friday at BAM. It was a great, refined, change of pace evening for the indie rock crowd. The evening was really a sum of it's parts, all told. The entire presentation of the BQE piece was far more engaging than the actual music itself. It was solid, but not up to Suf's lofty magical standards. But the little things...the gritty video clips of the...

Takeover BAM went down Saturday night after Sufjan Stevens’s last BQE show. There were 5 bands playing until 4am in the Opera House, bawdy burlesque shows, DJs and dancing in the swank BAM café, art by Mighty Robot and others, rock documentaries, a Lindsay Lohan Mid-Career Retrospective (“Mid-Career” – get it?) and $3 beer. It sounded like such a great time that we eagerly showed up at 11:30, only to realize that we weren’t the...

FAIR: Attention vinyl junkies! WFMU is hosting their Record Fair starting this eve and running throughout the weekend. "Hundreds of dealers specializing in the out sounds that WFMU is adored for delivering year round will gather for three days of merciless hawking o' the wax, and thousands of area music geeks are already trembling with nervous anticipation!" There will also be live performances this year, check out more details here.

The NY Post has video and renderings of what downtown Brooklyn will look like in 2012. With $9.5 billion in development projects in the works, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is proudly touting its future. The DBP's president Joe Chan told the Post, "This sends a message to the entire city - and even the world - that Brooklyn is in a period of unprecedented growth."

The serenader of the 50 states, Sufjan Stevens, grew his midwestern roots and reached New York in the late 90s -- where he has resided since. So it's only fitting a tribute to our state has arrived, after nearly a decade of soaking up the city. And perhaps separating himself from the rest of the city, he's found something special in the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. As announced this summer, Sufjan's latest muse is none other than the BQE, something he chose when commissioned by BAM to create an arrangement with a Brooklyn theme.

BAM Cinématek

Museum of the Moving Image

READING: Our interviewee from yesterday, Adrian Tomine, will be reading tonight at Book Court. The graphic novelist not only has his work in some of the more prestigious rags, he's also got a full length graphic novel, titled Shortcomings.

FILM: BAM features the work of Al Santana tonight. The Brooklyn filmmaker "has been a fixture on the independent film and video scene for years and his work ranges from documentaries about the transatlantic slave trade to coping with 9/11." Santana will be on hand for a Q&A tonight as well.

Tonight marks the beginning of the Film Society at Lincoln Center's 45th annual New York Film Festival and oh what a jam-packed fest it is. A panel of film critics chose 30 of the best new international movies to show to New York's discerning audiences and they picked hometown director Wes Anderson's newest, (which also comes out in theaters this weekend) to open the festival.