My aging car Sadie has become permanently fritzy, so I decided to make these last three days a staycation. I’d have minded except the city is absolutely brilliant on holiday weekends, especially ones blessed with such agreeable weather. I wandered, alternately sola and accompanied, through park after park, festival after festival, barbecue after barbecue, reading on lawns, playing with others’ puppies, eavesdropping on benches, drinking wine in backyards, basking in early-morning movies. (3D Max Max in an empty theater; mimosa, bagels and lox smuggled in my purse.) I also got my laundry done, yessir. As I write this, my bedspread is strewn with treasures I collected from three of our five boroughs, and an awful lot of it is gold and lilac and purple and sky blue and turquoise and the deepest of blues. High priestess mermaid colors. Here’s to a really beautiful city summer, full of sirens of every sort.
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The Leonard Library Club: ‘Radio Days’
Today at Williamsburg’s Leonard Library Club we’re screening Woody Allen’s “Radio Days,” which is like a Norman Rockwell portrait directed by a Kosher Fellini and starring the deliciously cranky likes of Larry David, Jeff Daniels, Dianne Wiest, Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow and a pint-sized Seth Green. I regard this film as one of Woody’s best mid-career efforts. Don’t agree? Come discuss. Don’t like Woody? Come discuss that, too. I am leading the post-screening conversation, and hope it’ll be lively. It’s free, it’s going to rain this afternoon so you won’t be missing out on a gorgeous day, and it’s perfectly timed for the post-brunch crowd. (2:30 pm.) So do come! And get regular with Relax!
The ‘Kids’ Were Alright
It begins with a pair of half-clad teenagers making out, which is a conventional enough opening for a coming-of-age film. But these two look awkward rather than polished – the girl is barely pubescent, the guy is drowning in his big-boy boxers – and they’re going at it like guppies swallowing each other or cannibals mawing their last meal. The shot is not Hollywood sexy; it’s nasty, nothing you’d see in the too-cool-for-school movies about adolescents today. Welcome to “Kids,” the landmark film about New York City teenagers, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this spring. (Yes, we’re that old.)
Sprawling and unrepentant, “Kids” isn’t so much a study; it’s more a ninety-minute panoramic photograph, which is appropriate since it’s the first (and best) film by photographer Larry Clark. It also boasts the first screenplay by Harmony Korine, who went on to direct such jaw-slackers as “Gummo” (1997) and the neon-reactionary, pseudo-feminist “Spring Breakers” (2012). Between Korine and Clark, who has cited lower Manhattan’s male skateboarders as his chief inspiration, this is hardly an anthem of female liberation, though it adjacently highlights the need for young women’s rights, and debuts Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny, both of whom then prevailed as It Girls of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. (The latter girl was still technically a “Metro North queen” who lived in her parents’ tony Connecticut home). Continue Reading →