Grace Jones, Queen of Everything (Via the Kitchen)
Dirty Looks: A One Man Show
Monday February 8, 8 pm at The Kitchen: $10
So this one’s a little bit beyond this week, but we fear that if you don’t make plans quick-like, you’re gonna miss out. Tickets appear to be sold out online already, but the venue suggests that you contact them and hopefully they’ll have some availability at the door. DREAM BIG. Why? Because Grace Jones is worth it.
Thanks to Dirty Looks (the organization that puts on all sorts of amazing queer film events), we’re blessed with a killer combination of awesome: Rashaad Newsome, the Bushwick newcomer and artist whose bread-and-butter is the art of vogue, will introduce A One Man Show, the result of Grace Jones’ 1982 collaboration with photographer Jean-Paul Goude– the guy who shot that amazing but scandalous and some say racist/exploitative series, Jungle Fever. (And also, we should mention, the same dude who portrayed Kim Kardashian’s ass as an apt champagne flute pedestal for the cover of Paper mag.)
Needless to say, Goude and Grace combined made a bit of a stir, but they also created an early example of something groundbreaking and innovative together: the music video as an integral part to an album’s aesthetic wholeness.
Dirty Looks quotes Grace Jones’ memoir, in which the icon looks back on the collaboration: “It was like the invention of a new genre […] It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a Black singer and female entertainer, because those ways had turned into clichés, which kept me pent up in a cage. I wanted to jolt the adult world that is traditionally left bland by white men, to shatter certain kinds of smugness through performance and theater.”
Greater New York: Los Sures
January 17 through 23 at MoMA PS1: free with museum admission
As part of MoMA PS1’s massive, all-encompassing exhibition series, Greater New York which began in October and will extend through March 7, Williamsburg’s Union Docs will present a handful of neighborhood-centric films.
The centerpiece of the program is Los Sures, a 1984 documentary about Williamsburg’s Southside (or Los Sures, as it was named by the Puerto Rican community) when the neighborhood was unrecognizably rough. The doc centers on how poverty, drugs, gangs and, above all, a lack of resources from the city presented incredible challenges for the people who lived there. Union Docs has done a great deal of work to restore the film (both physically and as an important part of the neighborhood’s history and identity) and screen it.
In addition to screening the full-length doc, the organizers are showcasing a snippet from their assortment of mini-docs– each one is also about Los Sures– inspired by the film. One of the lil’ movies, Toñitas (made by Beyza Boyacioglu and Sebastián Díaz Aguirre) zeroes in on a Caribbean social club, which acts as a cultural center, music venue, and party space for one community.
Labyrinth
Friday January 22 and Saturday January 23, midnight at Nitehawk Cinema
If you’re anything like me, you’ll never forgive your parents for forcing you to live a childhood without Labyrinth. I wasn’t exposed to this film until late middle school, when I was already an adult (knowing how to rip a bong counts), so it was pretty much ruined for me. I spent the next year wondering what else I’d missed out on as a kid, and coming to the awful realization that maybe I’d never really been a child at all (heh, again with the weed too early thing).
But here’s your chance (and my own) to relive the kinder-life that was savagely stolen from you. Oh, and this Nitehawk screening of Labyrinth is also a great way to say RIP to Mr. David Bowie. (We here at B+B have already paid our dues with our collection of Bowie downtown mems.) If for some reason you don’t get tix, then I highly recommend you grab a friend with a projector (or if you don’t know anyone with one of those bad boys, put an SOS out on Tinder or something), fill a popcorn bowl with ludes, light some candles from your local botanica and be on your way. And remember, dance magic dance!
The Dunwich Horror
Thursday January 28, 9 pm at Anthology Film Archives
This 1970 horror film from director Daniel Haller (the art director guy behind Little Shop of Horrors) is mainly attractive for what Anthology calls its “bizarre cast”– including the “fading ingénue Sandra Dee.” The story is based on a the short tale by H.P. Lovecraft. Though the original takes place in 1928, obviously the ’70s were, well, all about the ’70s– so we’re blessed with the teased-up dos, silk headscarves, and secretary skirts, with an occultist twist of course.
The college girl, played by Sandra Dee of course, falls in love with the wrong kind of guy. And we’re not talking some finance bro, no– Wilbur is no ordinary snake. Sandra Dee gets taken for a hellish ride through demonic encounters and supernatural occurrences. The movie is rife with occult symbols and witchy goings-on, this is Lovecraft we’re dealing with after all. As one critic wrote, “H.P. Lovecraft meets Hollywood […] Attractive females added to fill out the plot.