Wednesday Night in Williamsburg: SummerScreen presents Prince Rama and Telepathe and "Dirty Dancing"

We love Prince Rama, and we haven't seen them live in over a year, when they appeared at their DVD release party at the sadly-departed Monster Island Basement, so we were thrilled to get to see this incredible duo up close tonight at the McCarren Park ballfields as they opened The L Magazine's SummerScreen presentation of Dirty Dancing.

They were pretty incredible, as usual, and though we first saw them two years ago back when they were a trio at Brooklyn Bridge Park, and we've listened to their music, this was the best we'd ever seen or heard them. The sisters Taraka Larson and Nimai Larson absolutely were in top form early this evening. Later there was a very nice set from Telepathe, Brooklynites Melissa Livaudais and Busy Gangnes

We'd seen Dirty Dancing decades ago, but we also lived it, as the child of parents who were part owners of a hotel in South Fallsburg (the DeVille, previously the Nemerson) and someone who, like Jennifer Grey's character Baby, spent the summer of 1963 in a Borscht Belt hotel (The Raleigh, owned by our parents' good friend George Gilbert, who was, though he'd be surprised to hear it, a role model for a kid who knew he was a little different).

But in the summer of tonight's film, 49 summers ago, we were 12, not 17, and not so interested in dancing or (definitely not) girls as we were in the jokes of our friends' mom, the great comedienne Totie Fields, who also lived at the hotel with her husband George. We, and her fans, have missed her a lot. That's another side of 1963 and the Borscht Belt. But we're very grateful to the amazing Todd P and SummerScreen for allowing us to see tonight's music and movie. It was perfect. Especially Prince Rama!

Friday Evening in Williamsburg: Northside Festival presents Of Montreal, Jens Lekman, The Thermals and Beach Fossils at McCarren Park

This evening we had a terrific time in McCarren Park, having been lucky enough to win free tickets to the Northside Festival show featuring an incredibly diverse group of talented musicians: of Montreal, Jens Lekman, The Thermals and Beach Fossils (who we last saw in October). We feel dopey about saying anything about the music since we don't have the vocabulary or critical sense to write intelligently. (Our excuse is that we are 61 years old.) For us, it was fun to be inside at a Northside show at the park rather than watching from the sidelines, as we did last year for Beirut and Guided by Voices. We went for free, but anyone who got there at 5 p.m. and stayed until the profoundly exhilarating end of the night more than got their money's worth. Here's intelligent commentary in Rolling Stone by the fine music critic Stacey Anderson, who begins her review:

The performers of the biggest show of the Northside Festival – a multi-venue independent rock sprawl in fashionable Williamsburg, Brooklyn – were an unlikely mix. The flamboyant freak-folk rockers Of Montreal, the winsomely deadpan singer-songwriter Jens Lekman, and the bracing yet introspective punks the Thermals played the main stage at McCarren Park in fractured but happy succession, united in their enthusiastic stage presence and little else. After openers Beach Fossils, who spun their woozy pop for a tepid 5 p.m. crowd of tumbleweeds and visibly hung-over hipsters, the Thermals roused the slowly gathering masses with a taut, kinetic set.

(Video of of Montreal courtesy Fairytale of Hurt) And Anderson concludes her review (please read the whole thing):

[of Montreal]’s range was well represented, especially in the set closer "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal," off their mercurial 2007 breakthrough Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? The near 12-minute song was meted out exhaustively, with no wildly clad dancers in sight; the spectacle was contained, and completely satisfying, in the chilling prog-rock jamming and nearly unbearable tension of the epic track, an exceptional high-wire act of musicianship and a suitable conclusion for the good-natured yet highly unusual night in Brooklyn.

(Photo by Alex Reside for RollingStone.com)

We are very, very grateful we could be there. Thanks to the Northside Festival for making us a winner.

Wednesday Night in Williamsburg: SummerScreen Rained Out at McCarren Park

Although we waited until the quick monsoon passed to leave our house and found a rainbow over McCarren Park, we were disappointed to find that tonight's SummerScreen was canceled due to the rainstorm, and we heard, some equipment damage.

People were still around, though.

Vitamin Water was being sold at highly discounted prices, and so was some food. The contents of freshly ordered pizza boxes were being eaten standing up.

SummerScreen's hard-working intrepid photographer would not be affected by a mere thunderstorm.

We think he should be paid a bonus for tonight.

The Iranian band, YEllow Dogs, whom we had been excited to get to see perform, have faced a lot worse in Tehran.

When a cop bicycles over to a band there, they usually don't have the good intentions of this member of New York's Finest as the band packed up.

Some people abandoned drenched blankets. We are so old and cheap that the thought crossed our mind that we could take some over to the Metro Community Laundromat dryers, but nah, we're not that old and cheap.

So we walked home with some Vitamin Water and our trusty umbrella. We were grateful to hear that Wayne's World has been rescheduled for August 17.

Wednesday Night in Williamsburg: TECLA opens EPIX and The L Magazine's SummerScreen presentation of "Friday" at McCarren Park

Tonight at the McCarren Park ballfields, our friends at The L Magazine, in conjunction with EPIX Movies Free-For-All, presented the first SummerScreen

show of the summer, Friday, which we enjoyed. But we really came to see TECLA, who opened for the film with a really terrific set that began at 7 p.m.

TECLA is Tecla Esposito, and she's got these killer albums, Strangers in Masks and the remix Strangers Revisited, that we've listened to repeatedly, with more pleasure each time.

For her great performance tonight we have to thank Nicole Wasilewicz of Free Williamsburg, who's curating this season's SummerScreen music acts. Also, backup on drumes, etc, by the talented and shirtless Kassa Overall.

Anyway, SummerScreen is always worth going to. We scored an EPIX mat to sit on and had a chance to enter a raffle to win an iPad and other good stuff, as we did last Thursday's film in Tompkins Square Park. There's lots of good food and drink, too.

And lots of cool people, of course.

We sometimes worry that when, as an old uncool person, write about something, we'll infect it with our un-coolness. That's why we understood when this photographer hired by EPIX asked everyone around us if he could take their pics, and um, just pretended we were invisible. Which we are, of course.

We just don't want to be confused to the poor old Larry 'Bud' Melman lookalike who got scarily close to Tecla towards the end of the set and then, seeming to think it was an open mike event, asked to perform next.

Anyway, you should check out TECLA's work and all the people smarter than us who've said good things about this terrific tropical-electro-pop musician.


Friday, of course, is now the classic that spawned a whole series of increasingly less funny sequels with Ice Cube.


We're grateful we got to get to SummerScreen for the movie and fine music on this beautiful night in Williamsburg. We're also grateful we live just a few blocks away because we've been up since 4:30 a.m.

Sunday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Stephen Mallon's "Next Stop Atlantic" at the Front Room Gallery

On a bright blue, somewhat chilly afternoon we walked down Metropolitan Avenue over to the Front Room Gallery on Roebling Street to catch the last day of Next Stop Atlantic, the exhibition by the brilliant photographer Stephen Mallon that we'd heard a lot of good things about.

The photographs of the process of turning discarded New York City subway cars into artificial reefs, in order to create a refuge for thefish and crustaceans which would colonize the structures, were absolutely stunning.

Mallon, a Clinton Hill resident, got a lot of wonderful notices for his striking "Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549," a series of photographs documenting the salvaging of the US Airway flight that, amazingly, airline captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had managed to safely emergency-land in the Hudson River in on January 15, 2009.

We don't have the vocabulary or expertise to comment intelligently on these hauntingly surreal photos -- at the fabulous School of Visual Arts, we do teach classes of photography majors, but we teach them Shakespeare, Dante, Voltaire, Kafka and Beckett -- but this review by Benjamin Sutton of the exhibit at The L Magazine we clipped out last month drew us here to see it before it closed:

The industrial photographer followed the MTA's involvement in a project to build artificial reefs along the East Coast, committing stripped subway cars to the sea floor to provide shelter for marine life. That process, documented in the exhibition's 15 medium- to large-format color photographs, opens with the decontaminated cars stacked on a dock like shipping containers, gathering snow in bleak winter sunlight.

Lifted onto barges, the iconic cars are a puzzling sight, suddenly slowed from their clanging subterranean velocity to a few swaying naughts per hour. In Mallon's crisply focused photographs, the awkward barges piled high with the tinny shells look downright biblical, the last surviving members of some extinct species of slithering underground monster crowded aboard a madman's ark.

There's an incredibly gentle rhythm to Mallon's series, too, with stage in the journey following at a plodding, measured speed befitting the huge forms in play. The pace only quickens at the end, when a massive forklift tips and knocks cars into the ocean. In "Virginia Placement" (2008), an 18-ton car flies off the barge; shot suspended in mid-air, the clunky hull has all the grace of a Hummer limousine rattling along Meatpacking District cobblestones.

Nonetheless, the momentary impression of weightlessness, the anticipation of impact evoke Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris" (1932), the inevitable splash tantalizingly withheld. A few feet away, Mallon unleashes the full force of impact in "Bellagio" (2010), with a nearly symmetrical wall of water sent shooting up as a car belly-flops into the ocean. As the reefs-to-be slip beneath the surface, shots of cars half-filled with water are the series' strangest.

In "Settling" (2008) a car sits oddly upright at the top of the frame, with water like sluggish Bedford stop commuters pouring into its wide open doorways. En route to their very last stops, these elaborately (and expensively) manufactured objects double as time capsules, tokens from a culture trying fitfully to repair environmental damage it's done in even the most bizarre and oddly poetic ways.

Yes, it's really poetic, almost dreamlike and definitely filled with a weird majesty: after all, these are the subways that we get crammed into in rush hour, and here they are, stripped and decontaminated (from us!) and becoming part of nature. You can see Stephen Mallon's photographs in their glory on his website.

We're grateful to him and to the Front Street Gallery for this show and glad we got to experience it before it closed.