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.

Thursday Night in the East Village: Epix Movie Free-for-All presents "Raging Bull" introduced by Don King at Tompkins Square Park

We got to Tompkins Square Park around 8 p.m. on Thursday to see the first in what's called Epix Movie Free-For-All screenings -- this one, of Martin Scorsese's classic Raging Bull, starring Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta, and introduced by the still-around, best-known boxing promoter ever, Don King.

When we got there, the band Odetta & Gryphon were playing -- well, at the moment they were asking if anyone in the audience could re-string a guitar. Actually, they were quite good, and fetchingly winsome, and it had been a long time since we'd seen anyone successfully play the musical saw.

Epix is a giant company, or seems to be, that we had never heard from before. Epix is sponsoring a series of screenings of movies in city parks this summer, and we guess this was the first. They certainly were spending money here on all sorts of stuff. There as an additional screen in the grassy space, weird but mystical attractions for kids (a Wii-type video game booth, a baroque little carousel, video screens, free cotton candy), lots of attractions for adults, too, and probably never so much corporate presence in Tompkins Square Park of '60s counterculture corporate revulsion history.

They seem to be a premium TV channel sort of like HBO with movies and exciting live events. After Odetta & Gryphon left the stage (we'd missed an earlier band, Raging Bluegrass), an announcer/MC announced the many, many winners of what seemed like actually valuable prizes in a contest. The winners seemed happy. The MC at one point called the venue Thompson Square Park.

The great and legendary Don King lived up to his reputation by delivering a bombastic, rambling, hyperpatriotic talk (he carried a mess of flags, of which we could name only those of the good old U.S.A. and Israel) about Raging Bull, which he called a masterpiece "not just about boxing but about life" although he seemed to think its moral could be boiled down to something like "don't be so jealous about your woman."

He wore a star-spangled denim jacket, his hair looked whiter and more subdued, he pronounced "pummeled" with the accent on the final syllable, he quoted the Bard of Avon (we hope young'uns understood that that meant Shakespeare), and was just so adorable and charming that you immediately wanted to adopt him as your grandfather. One of our grandfathers used to smoke cigars in the park, too.

And, of yes, he praised the Epix people and their mission a whole lot. Did we mention their visionary leader, Mark Greenberg? From what we heard last night, he is a fine person and we hope he soon will be leading the polls among presidential candidates in the Iowa Republican caucuses. We're not kidding.

There was a really nice short beforehand, I Never Blamed the Beautiful Game, presented by the fine organization, Rooftop Films, which also should be running for president, or at least governor of Maine. The only drawback to tonight's event is that it seemed to have discombobulated Tompkins Square Park's venerable mentally ill residents, some of whom had the tendency to pop up here and there, sometimes in pairs, to rant a little. Well, they're certainly entitled, and Jake LaMotta would have approved.

Of the main event of the evening, Raging Bull, we can add nothing. It's amazing. We first saw it on December 31, 1980, New Year's Eve, at Century's Fresh Meadows Theater (you can read our book A Year in Rockaway: 1980, currently ranking #3,841,187 on Amazon bestsllers, to find out more).

We knew immediately back then that it was one of the greatest films ever made, and we're grateful to Epix for giving it to us as a gift, along with Don King and all the other stuff, here in the East Village on this beautiful night thirty years and six months later. If we ever get cable TV, we'll definitely sign up for Epix. And you should too, people. You'll never get them down, Ray. Ya hear us? Never get them down.

Youtube video courtesy of insidehoops