If you’ve ever been to Union Square, you’ve seen them: They chant, drum; sometimes they even give you a free copy of their scripture. Hare Krishnas are often shrugged off as an urban oddity on par with clipboard people, but what lies behind those orange robes and endless mantras?
This Friday, June 16, Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It will premiere at Village East Cinema. The documentary tells the story of Srila Prabhupada, a disheveled 70-year-old Hindu who boarded a freighter to the U.S. in August 1965 with little more than three self-translated religious texts and instructions from his guru to “offer spiritual wisdom to the people of the world.”
Something strange is happening in the American psyche right now. Just a few years ago, the heroes of New York City-centric comedy TV were disconnected 20-somethings with suspiciously fancy apartments who wandered the earth clueless as to why no one wanted to date their flawless Tinder profile/soulless body. Now, they’re much tinier creatures that we rarely notice IRL and if we do, we’re like gagging and pointing and screaming: “Gawwwwd, I think that rat is bubonic.”
Hot on the hoofs of Louis CK’s The Secret Life of Pets, and HBO’s Animals (which just returned for season two), a new animated feature from Brooklyn-based animation company Cartuna offers a peek at what these city-dwelling creatures see in us humans. Obviously, it ain’t pretty.
Hundreds of dressed-up doggies descended upon Tompkins Square Park on Saturday for the 26th annual Halloween Dog Parade, and it was an adorable sight to behold.
Maybe you thought the summer’s outdoor film fests had already announced their lineups (and hopefully you snagged tickies to next Saturday’s sold-out screening of the Death by Audio documentary at Rooftop Films, followed by a set from A Place to Bury Strangers). If so, you were mistaken. In Rockaway, the annual Beach Flix series is still getting its act together, and in the East Village the folks at Howl! Arts have taken their sweet time letting us know what’s coming to Tompkins Square Park this summer. But good things come to cinefiles who wait. More →
Whether you know it as International Workers Day or as spring-inflected May Day, this year’s May 1 falls on a weekend, which means two days packed to the brim with events ranging from the revolutionary to the ridiculous. With a hat tip to Conor Tomás Reed from the Free University of NYC, here’s a roundup of events taking place in lower Manhattan and North Brooklyn.
New York isn’t allice cream scoops andWes Anderson art. These two upcoming events promise to take you back to the East Village’s edgier days of yore. You don’t have to walk across a sea of crack vials to get to them — one of them is even on a boat.
The folks at Films in Tompkins are once again bringing a big screen to Tompkins Square Park this year. This year, series founder Darin Rubell (owner of Forrest Point and Boulton & Watt) has tapped some celebs to pick the flicks. Tonight James Franco has selected Chinatown, preceded by the “post-hipster smooth jazz” of Todd Gaynor. Hopefully he’ll bust out his smokin’ sax cover of Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So.”
“Gates” open at 6 p.m., movies starting at sundown.
The folks at Films in Tompkins are once again bringing a big screen to Tompkins Square Park this year. This year, series founder Darin Rubell (owner of Forrest Point and Boulton & Watt) has tapped some celebs to pick the flicks. Tonight is Billy Joel’s pick, Big Night . It’ll be preceded by a live set from — sorry, not the Piano Man — Hawthorne, at 7 p.m.
“Gates” open at 6 p.m., movies starting at sundown.
Onur Tukel must’ve set some kind of record when he premiered Applesauce at Tribeca Film Festival just weeks before premiering his other new film at the Brooklyn Film Festival. So how the hell did he do it? It all came to light last night during the premiere of his very latest, Abby Singer/Songwriter, at Windmill Studios in Greenpoint. More →
Have you ever wondered what another city’s pollution tastes like? Of course you haven’t. And yet, there it was: a tasting booth serving up smog meringue at Ideas City last Saturday. The edible experiment traps all kinds of nasty grit, grime and chemicals in an egg and sugar mixture, ruining what would have been a tasty dessert for the sake of science. At the festival put on by New Museum we not only tasted London and Atlanta but also stopped by a soil testing booth to check out what lurks in some dirt samples we collected from Tompkins Square and McCarren Parks. Here’s what we found out. More →
