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)

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)

Early Saturday Afternoon in Bushwick: Start of Idiotarod 2011 on Grattan Street

We thought we came across the end of the 2011 Idiotarod around noon today in Bushwick but later learned it was actually the beginning. We were walking down Bogart Street to the L train when we saw what seemed to be a snowball fight between contestants in the shopping cart race on either side of Grattan Street.

People were being told not to go into the gutter (street for non-native New Yorkers), which hadn't at all been plowed.

The south side of Grattan Street seemed to be lobbing most of the snowballs over to the north side.

The race's start and route are always mysterious. We got a better look four years ago, when we were near McCarren Park in Greenpoint.

Last year's race was, according to Carts of Brooklyn, supposed to start at Socrates Sculpture Park, but apparently this year everyone knew it would be in Brooklyn. As our friend Aaron Short wrote in The Brooklyn Paper, the Idiotarod is "the famed third jewel of the hipster Triple Crown (after SantaCon and the No Pants Subway Ride)."

We had business in Fort Greene this morning and when we got home at 11:40 a.m., we read on Gothamist that the race was starting in Maria Hernandez Park.

We took the L train to Montrose Street and moseyed about and had already given up when we heard the noise.

Obviously there are non-crappy actual race pics elsewhere. Por ejemplo, this Yfrog pic by esbcivic of a team psyched up for battle at Maria Hernandez Park

or this great photo by Gemini_Scorpio at Twitpic.

All we could get was a shot of one of the Team Monster Mash team looking lonely in the snow.

And this weird pic looks like a female cosmonaut is about to be menaced by something other than a snowball. We heard someone ask, "How are you?" and another person answer, "Drunk."

Sorry, we're not a real photographer! We teach them at the fabulous School of Visual Arts, but only things like Antigone, The Inferno and Twelfth Night.

And we're sure there'll be more coming from the official Idiotarod 2011 press photographers. Check out the great Anna Fischer.

All we saw was what we first thought the end of the route, with the what we assumed was the after-party at the Pine Box Rock Shop about to begin. We were too cold and too old for this, so we returned to Dumbo Books HQ in Williamsburg. Only later did we realize that we saw in fact not the ending, but the start of the race, which went on to Greenpoint (as we assumed it would -- they were just ten times slower than we would have believed).

So the Pine Box Rock Shop was the first check-in point, and the after-party was at Coco666 around 4 p.m. Still, it was a colorful enough part of the race in disgustingly snow-ridden Brooklyn for us to enjoy.

Like we said, this winter will happily be our last in Brooklyn. Next year, we'll be a sexagenarian enjoying watching the Phoenix Idiotarod (scheduled this year for next Saturday) in 70 degree warmth amidst the palm trees.

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.