Saturday Night in Astoria: Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with So Young Park, Petr Nekoranec,and Hyung Yung at Socrates Sculpture Park

(Videos courtesy Vladimir Efros)





(Fifteen videos of entire recital here)

Sunday Afternoon in Astoria: At Astoria Skatepark

Monday Night in Astoria: Metropolitan Opera Summer Recital Series with Michelle Bradley, Kang Wang and Yunpen Wang at Socrates Sculpture Park

(Videos courtesy Vladimir Efros)




(More videos here)

Late Tuesday Afternoon in Astoria: That Lady Who Sings "Only You" on the M Train

(Video courtesy Shannon Ayala)

Sunday Afternoon in Astoria: CatGut Banjo Band in Astoria Park

(Video courtesy NewYork2Havana)

Saturday Afternoon in Astoria Park: World Skateboarding Grand Prix NYC Rider Cup Queens Qualifier at Astoria Skatepark

(Video courtesy BigD)

Tuesday Evening in Astoria: Jess Jezel and Summer Nites rehearsing at Astoria Park

(Video courtesy Christopher Brunelle)

Wednesday Night in Long Island City: Outdoor Cinema 2009 presents "Waltz with Bashir" at Socrates Sculpture Park

Since we got an afternoon email saying that Summerscreen's McCarren Park showing of Fame had been canceled due to "inclement weather," we went east to Long Island City tonight for clearer skies and the 2008 Israeli film Waltz with Bashir (ואלס עם באשיר‎) at Socrates Sculpture Park.

We don't really think it rained anywhere in the city tonight, but the early forecasts were pretty ominous. By 6 p.m. we observed that Outdoor Cinema 2009 had tweeted
Outdoor Cinema is on! Scattered showers are possible, but we will not stop rolling unless it rains. Pack an umbrella and take your chances! so we headed for Long Island City.

The G train we got on wasn't very cool, and we were schvitzing, so we got off at Greenpoint Avenue and caught the chilly B24 bus at its first stop, taking it across Greenpoint Avenue to Sunnyside. There we walked a couple of blocks and caught the Q104 for its entire route, which took us on a nice ride up Broadway through Steinway and Astoria to Vernon Boulevard, where the Socrates Sculplture Park is.

For those who don't know, it's a gorgeous park filled with fun and thought-provoking art. Lori wrote on the informative SiteBits:

Until 1986, the site of the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, was an illegal riverside landfill, abandoned and ugly. A group of local artists [led by Mark Di Suvero] got together and decided to turn the area into a park and outdoor museum.

In the summer, Socrates hosts a a free outdoor cinema featuring international films and sometimes live music. All are invited to bring a picnic and a blanket, and watch the film starting at dusk. Also throughout the summer, Socrates offers sculpture and art classes for all ages, tai chi and yoga on Saturday mornings until September 30 (all which are also free).

The park foundation awards several artists a residency each year. They may work on site, and have the opportunity to display extremely large scale work, the only location like it in New York. The sculptures change about every 6 months. Visitors are invited to look, play, climb, learn, photograph and let their dogs run around the sculptures and park.

The stats aside, the park is totally amazing. Not only is it an actual grassy space with trees, but it has a breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline and East River. There are a few meandering paths and river overlooks that SOME people might deem "romantic" (yes, there are stupid kissing couples everywhere). [Lots of dogs, too!] A walk through the park really creates a sense of detachment from the hustle and bustle of New York. The sea smells like the sea, the trees are thick in areas and private, the space is open and lush. How can this be New York?

Not to mention the amazing sculptures!

We walked around for a while, looking at the sculpture and wandering the gentle slopes around the waterfront.

The skyline looked so beautiful as the sun set.

The crowd was mixture of all kinds of people and, like the animated film being shown, featured more dogs than little kids.

In its eleventh year, Outdoor Cinema at Socrates Sculpture Park is an international film festival in cooperation with The Museum of the Moving Image, which is always worth a trip to Astoria (we've been there twice in recent years). There's also international music, dance and food, "celebrating the cultural diversity of Queens."

So tonight Naomi's Kosher Pizza and Israel Falafel from Flushing were being enjoyed by the people around us, including several guys with yarmulkes and women with hijabs.

The music by Israeli cellist Yoed Nir was sublime.


Here's a sample, from a 2007 concert in New York (he lives here now):

The movie began after Sean Leonardo, Socrates Sculpture Park's events director, welcomed us to the park and asked people to donate $5 to support the programming and get a glow-in-the-dark bracelet and after a speaker from the Museum of the Moving Image introduced Waltz with Bashir, a 2008 animated film by Ari Folman, who also is one of the writers on the TV show In Therapy.

We found the movie gripping, hauntingly beautiful and mesmerizing from its opening scene with a pack of wild dogs in a recurring dream.

A.O. Scott, reviewing Waltz with Bashir in the New York Times, called it

a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.

Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, “Waltz” is by no means the world’s only animated documentary. . . But Mr. Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power.

Tired of sitting cross-legged, we stood up for the final 20 minutes of this hallucinatory film. There were tears in our eyes most of the time as it moved to its unspeakably horrific conclusion, the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Phalangist fighters which Israeli leaders let happen.

It ends switching from animation to the graphic, horrifying images of real dead bodies and screaming, mourning Palestinian women which will always be seared into our consciousness from that summer of 1982.

That year, along with others, we signed a petition opposing the Lebanon war that appeared in a Jewish weekly.

A few months later, at our Davie, Florida address, we received a letter from a rabbi in Lynn, Massachusetts, informing us that because of that ad, we'd been excommunicated by a rabbinical court.

We hadn't known that Judaism even had such a thing as excommunication, but it looked pretty official - so that's how we became Episcopalian.

The film ended around 9:40 p.m. and we got home to Williamsburg over an hour later by taking the Q104 and then the N and 7 trains for one stop each and the G train from Court Square home to Metropolitan Avenue.

It was a great evening, and we're grateful for Socrates Sculpture Park and the Museum of the Moving Image for making available such a terrific movie for us tonight.

Saturday Afternoon in Astoria: Second Annual Astoria Music Now! festival at Astoria Park

This afternoon we took the G, 7 and N trains and then walked longer than we expected to the lovely Astoria Park, on the water between the RFK/Triboro and Hell Gate bridges, for Astoria Music Now!, the second annual festival sponsored by Astoria Music & Arts. We stayed a few hours and had a good time.

Justin Finley, the festival founder and creative director, said that its intent is to celebrate and maybe give a much-needed leg up to Astoria's energetic music scene.

"There are tons of musicians living in Astoria," Finley told the Daily News. "But the model has always been that you have to go into Manhattan or Brooklyn to play. We and a bunch of other people are trying to celebrate our own local music scene."

There were four stages for bands from noon going till 9 p.m., arts and crafts vendors, a young woman ("Love Girl") in a weird but fetching outfit selling smoothies, an art wall featuring work by Ben Louria, Jenna Newton, Vicky Barranguet, Betty T. Kao, and a bunch of other stuff.

Astoria Park is really gorgeous; this was our first time there, and the big surprise was how big it is. And to those of us from Williamsburg, another big surprise is that their pool actually contains some water - and lots of happy people cooling off.

At the Hell Gate Social Stage under the Hell Gate Bridge, we saw Bob Muir and the Enemy Below, who play the kind of depressing ballads that make those men so inclined (definitely not us) want to kill themselves when they hear them at 2 a.m. when they're driving home from a bar after striking out again with some women.

Their songs are whimsical and we liked the band's lack of pretension.

At the Quays Shore Stage we saw Matthew Snow & The Way It Was Is A Dream. Matthew is from Akron and pays too much for his apartment in Astoria.

Here he is with "Missing" at the Bowery Poetry Club a couple of months ago:

Following them we caught Stone Robot, an indie/garage/alternative rock band influenced by space, nature and robots.

We were most impressed with Lisa Bianco, who also was working like a mofo in the role of stage organizer, not for organizing skills, but for her exceptionally fine music. The Village Voice called her work "galvanizing" and the East Coast Rocker called it "an interesting blend of alternative, guitar rock, and pure punk aggression."

We were actually headed in the other direction when we heard her first song, which was so mesmerizing that we turned on our heels (well, as best we could with plantar fasciitis) and went over to hear her whole set up close at the acoustic General Slocum stage.

"Postdata," from the album by the same name, was especially fine.

We saw some other good local bands and solo players and listened to pretty good DJs at the Lucky Mojo's Triboro stage by 19th Street before we walked down a block to catch the Q69 bus down 21st Street to the last stop by the Court Square G train terminus.

Astoria Arts & Music did a great job on the festival, and you know, Astoria Park and the whole wonderful neighborhood (when we were growing up in the '50s and '60s, it was as close to Greece as we ever got) is really not very far from Greenpoint and Williamsburg. We go there once in a while, but not as often as we should.