Brooklyn Academy of Music

What do Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz and Keith Haring all have in common? Each artist has work up for sale at the 4th Annual Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM to us locals) Silent Auction.

BAM certainly plays an integral part in the Brooklyn art scene, and the auction, which raises money for BAM's various programs, raked in $237,500 last year. Artists from all over the borough have work for sale—which you can bid on on BAM's Web site—many from Williamsburg, Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. Bidding is open until April 13, when the closing reception will bring in the final bids.

Brooklyn has certainly always nurtured creative talent—nothing new there. The borough has increasingly become home to prominent names in the fine-arts community. While an afternoon spent in Manhattan's great museums or in Chelsea's galleries is certainly invigorating, poking around unconventional spaces that have sprung up all over Brooklyn can turn into quite the adventure. Brooklyn is an urban jungle peppered with art, inside and outside of the spaces that facilitate creativity.  read more »

Roads paved with good intentions don’t always lead to Hell—often they go straight to BAM.  read more »

As a teenager I spent a fair amount of time traversing New York City's urban terrain in search of live music. I was partial to punk. I spent a lot of time at Saturday punk matinees at ABC No Rio and the Dumbo art collective DUMBA. At 16, I marched down to the DMV to get a resident ID to prove to CBGB's Hilly Kristal that I was old enough to shove people to an orchestra of power chords.

I remember the devastation of Giuliani's ruling against dancing in bars and the death knell of advancing gentrification, the demise of the places I used to frequent (except for ABC No Rio, which managed to buy its squatted building from the city in the late 90's and is now planning a serious renovation). In a recent article for The Observer, Chris Shott described the debilitating regulatory environment that many music venues contend with now.  read more »

>> The National, Feb. 22-23, Brooklyn Academy of Music (sold out)

"No way! A 2,500 seat theater!" said The National’s Bryce Dessner, sounding more like one his band’s teenage fans than a well-traveled 34-year-old guitarist. He was calling from Ditmas Park—a few neighborhoods south of the Brooklyn Academy of Music where his brooding hometown band will take the stage for two sold-out nights tonight and tomorrow night. "It's just not something we would have considered."  read more »

Something Star Trek this way comes! It’s the Brooklyn Academy of Music's massive production of Macbeth, starring the man most well known as Cap. Jean-Luc Picard, Mr. Patrick Stewart, who, as the New York Post’s Michael Riedel conjectures, may be on his way to a Tony. Follow the logic:  read more »

The hummingbird-voiced harpist Joanna Newsom played the first of two shows with the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM last night, and it wasn’t cutesy or quirky or kitschy.

It was glorious.

Her album Ys, a five-song epic named for a flooded mythical city, was huge and pristine onstage: violins, voices, the harp, horns and harmonies shook and bent and swelled together until everything bulged and burst, and bubbled up again.  read more »

It's hard out there for Paul Simon. Or, at least, love is, according to a new series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "Love in Hard Times: The Music of Paul Simon" will celebrate Mr. Simon's works with three programs in April, according to the New York Times. Mr. Simon himself and David Byrne will team up with other musicians to bang out some South African and Brazilian rhythms for "Under African Skies," from April 9-13. That performance will be sandwiched between "Songs from 'The Capeman,'" a staging of a Broadway show written by Mr. Simon from April 1-6, and "American Tunes," with Mr. Simon performing some of his classics (and obscure selections) with Brooklyn's Grizzly Bear, "bluesman" Olu Dara and others. Tickets go on sale Feb. 11, or Feb. 4 if you're a BAM member, according to the organization's site.

Harpist-turned-psych folk poster girl Joanna Newsom will follow Sufjan Stevens', um, wand waves and perform with an orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Feb. 8 next year. She'll sing her dreamy, folk-inspired songs and pluck strings on her massive harp in Brooklyn after a two-day stay at the Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Orchestra.  read more »

Folk poster boy Sufjan Stevens will debut his orchestral piece The BQE at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival next week. The shows on Nov. 1-3 are sold out, but this Sunday, Oct. 28, from 7 to 8 p.m., Mr. Stevens will preview some of his orchestral work on David Garland's radio show "Spinning on Air", according to Pitchfork. You can listen online at WNYC. Check out a video excerpt of the session here.

According to BAM:

Robert Moses' controversial 11.7-mile roadway tears through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens with the brute force of modern urban planning, and in Stevens' hands becomes an evocation of the intersection of intimate experience and the American Dream. Merging a virtual road trip shot on film with a live band and orchestral ensemble, The BQE discovers abstract patterns and stories in the snaking traffic, potholed pavement, billboards, badly marked exits, and beautiful city views, revealing what happens when Manifest Destiny converges with urban blight.

Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude and “genre bending” hipster, chose several films for Jonathan Lethem Selects, a month-long film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the 2006/2007 chair of the Friends of BAM board, he chose High and Low, This Sporting Life, La Collectionneuse, The Lineup, Murder by Contract, Ruggles of Red Gap, Straight Time, Love Streams, and Shame.

Tonight at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., it’s 1963’s This Sporting Life, a movie about a working class coal-miner-turned-star rugby player directed by Lindsay Anderson.

Lethem feeds us a heaping spoonful of pretension (and a name-drop for our own Andrew Sarris!) in this interview on the BAM site:

Matthew Buchholz: Looking at the films you selected for the series here at BAM, is there any thread connecting all of them?

Jonathan Lethem: Well, at the risk of the tautology, "the thread in the Jonathan Lethem Selects films is that Jonathan Lethem selected them," when I glance at the list that resulted I can't keep from thinking that the only thing those films all have particularly in common—apart from the excellence which makes me confident of thrusting them on other viewers—is that they form a kind of descriptive outline (like the arctic explorers standing in an arc around the submerged frozen spaceship in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby version of The Thing) around my cinematic obsessions."  read more »

Atlantic Yards photo of the day (VV)

• Just what the Upper East Side needs: a 16,000 square foot spa garden--not to mention an 8,000sf "indoor gym"--will open with the new condo at 550 East 72nd. Thanks to an Arizona company named Miraval, this baby will be the largest of its kind in the city. And thanks to the lucky brats in the new condo at 550 East, everyone else will be viciously jealous that they can't enjoy a cucumber mint coat mist from the comfort of their own condo. (Real Deal)
• The Village Voice looks into the Brooklyn Academy of Music's new Fort Greene "cultural district," and finds hefty doses of class conflict, racial conflict, Robert Moses and Bruce Ratner. Most interesting of all is an examination of the young Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, a tenant of the new 80 Hansen Place--or, excuse us--80 Arts. (Village Voice)
• Frank Bruni begins a bi-monthly Q&A series with Manhattan's best chefs. Yesterday he asked Pearl Oyster Bar's Rebecca Charles about her kitchen etiquette, embarrassments, and guilty secrets. ("Guilty?" Ms. Charles answers. "Not really. And hardly a secret.") Sometimes Bruni can be so charming. (New York Times)
• The snappily-named Museum of the City of New York gets a $70 million renovation. What will that mean for the East Harlem "landmark"? Mostly a big lobby, new exhibition spaces, and fancy storage areas. To celebrate, Mayor Bloomberg cuts a cake, and shouts: "It's a living museum." (NY1)
• The International Brotherhood of the Teamsters comes to friendly terms with Waste Management, and--presto!--10,000 New York business get back their "helpers who collect trash" after four months. (The title "garbage man" is obviously sexist and offensive.) (New York Times)
- Max Abelson  read more »
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Wednesday 14th  read more »