Last Call: Charles Dickens' HARD TIMES -- Theatrical Adapatation

(original engraving accompanying Dickens' novel)

HARD TIMES

From the Novel by Charles Dickens
Adapted by Stephen Jeffries

Saturday, December 8, 2 PM

Directed by Robert Kalfin
The Schaeberle Studio Theater
Pace University

As a follow up to our other Downtown Scenes explorations of urban issues, join us for this theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1854 novel of labor unions & industrialism in Victorian England. Controversial for its portrayal of social and economic issues of the times (Bernard Shaw lambasted Dickens for his "passionate revolt against the whole industrial order of the modern world," while George Orwell praised the novel for its "generous anger"), Hard Times provides a fascinating glimpse of a Victorian culture & history some-part truth, some-part mythmaking. We'll be looking to see what sort of resonances we might find between the Kalfin's adaptation and the issues we've been encountering related to New York City in the 1850s, and in the present day. A great follow up to Five Points Manhattan outing, GANGS of NEW YORK screening, and Luc Sante's LOWLIFE.

Meet at Broome at 1:00 to walk down to the theatre; cocoa & conversation to follow.

Limited tickets available -- RSVP to Colin @ colincheney@gmail.com -- by Tuesday, Noon.

A Downtown Scenes Event.

A Night Out with the New York School -- Multimedia "soiree" -- Tuesday, November 13th

Women and the New York School
Tuesday, November 13, 8:00pm

Come join a pretty rare gathering/performance of writers and artists related to the "New York School," an important arts movement and community emerging in the 1940s and still thriving in second and third incarnations today. A Downtown Scenes event, but all are encouraged to come.

Artists featured include Kim Gordon (bassist for Sonic Youth), poet Bernadette Mayer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. (For full details see below.)

RSVP to Colin, Downtown Scenes Faculty Affiliate, at colincheney@gmail.com .

Meet in Broome lobby at 7:00PM to go down to the event together.

--
A Night Out with the New York School

A multidisciplinary New York School soiree, featuring readings and performances by Kim Gordon, Wayne Koestenbaum, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann.

Kim Gordon is a musician and vocalist, who plays bass guitar in the band Sonic Youth. Wayne Koestenbaum's books include Hotel Theory and Andy Warhol. Bernadette Mayer's many collections of poetry include Sonnets and Midwinter Day. Eileen Myles is a poet, whose works include Chelsea Girls and Sorry, Tree. Maggie Nelson is the author of Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer, filmmaker and the author of Feelings Are Facts. Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings.

@ Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street

Downtown Book Club: Luc Sante's LOW LIFE (excerpt), discussion Wednesday 11/14

The Downtown Book Club will be discussing an excerpt from Luc Sante's historico-mythological romp through the nineteenth-century Lower East Side: LOW LIFE. We'll be looking at the opening chapters, which deal with bodies, houses, and street life.

Copies of the excerpt will be available at the front desk (the office where you pick up your packages) beginning Sat 11/3.

The discussion will take place Wednesday, 11/14, 8 pm, in the Broome Room.

Food provided.

As always, new members welcome! This material goes well with recent Downtown Scenes events centered on Manhattan's infamous Five Points.

Five Points Manhattan Walk and (Free) Lunch -- New Date and Time

Saturday, November 3: 11:00AM-1:30 PM

"Will anyone say that it is safe to the general health, humane to the poor, creditable to our civilization, or in any manner right and proper that these Dens should continue as they are – human packing houses and fountains of Disease and Vice?" So asked an 1850 New York newspaper in an article on of the "Dens of Death," cellar residences in the neighborhood of Five Points in Lower Manhattan. Once sensationalized as a center of sin and debauchery, this neighborhood can now be recognized as a diverse, complex and fascinating part of our evolving city history.

Tours of the neighborhood were popular in its heyday of infamy – "proper" New Yorkers venturing downtown to see if the fantastic tales the newspaper spun were in fact true. This Saturday – November 3^rd --we'll take a slightly different venture. Come along for a stroll around the historical Five Points area, seeking out the remaining landmarks and noticing the changes in the area, now occupied by a popular city park, the southern edge of Chinatown, a city jail, and a court house. We'll then have lunch at a great Thai restaurant near the park, and have an informal discussion of what we saw in the rich neighborhood around us, only a short walk from Broome Street.

Meet in Broome lobby at 11:00AM with your walking shoes on. We'll walk for about an hour and then have a Thai lunch.

RSVP to Colin, Downtown Scenes Faculty Affiliate, – colincheney@gmail.com

We're also screening GANGS OF NEW YORK, Martin Scorsese's "historical" tale of Five Points, on Friday night, so please attend this also to get a little bit of myth, a bit of truth, about the neighborhood.

Please read the following two websites to have a little primer on the background of the area and in history:

Urbanography – A brief commentary on Five Points , including newspaper accounts from the 1840s and 50s -- http://urbanography.com/5_points/index.html

National Geographic –Article published at the time when Martin Scorsese's GANGS OF NEW YORK premiered: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0320_030320_oscars_gangs.html

Ghost Tour of Lower Manhattan -- Downtown Scenes

Come search out the ghosts of downtown New York!

On Friday, October 26th, come along on a tour of supposedly haunted locales around City Hall in Lower Manhattan. We'll be taking a tour organized through "Ghost Tours of New York," and they say we'll try to find the spirits of "Algonquin Indians, Black slaves, Dutch settlers, Walt Whitman, P. T. Barnum, Captain Kidd, and the ghosts of Trinity Churchyard." We'll also, they say, perform an exorcism to lift the curse preventing mayors of New York City from going on to public office (I wonder if Rudy knows about this...).

The Details:
Ghost Tour of Lower Manhattan
Friday, October 26, 7pm
RSVP to Colin ( colincheney@gmail.com) , Downtown Scenes faculty affiliate, by Monday, October 22nd.
Wear comfy walking shoes, and a jacket.

We'll meet in the Broome lobby at 7pm to walk downtown, grabbing a quick slice or two of pizza (FREE!) along the journey. Bring your favorite ghost story to share with fellow Broome folk. (The tour itself starts at 8pm and will last about an hour and a half.)

Five Points (Manhattan) Walk POSTPONED

While two Five Points trips in one weekend sounded exciting - a double-header of sorts - we're postponing our local trip to Manhattan's Five Points, so as to make sure as many folks as possible can get up to the Queen's Five Point event -- a viewing of the legal graffiti there and a chat with a local artist. Our walk in search of the ghost of Leonardo DiCaprio in Chinatown, and our lunching with Cameron Diaz lookalikes at her favorite Thai place, will be postponed until early November. If you'd like to head along on the Queens event, please email Ana Christa (anachrista@nyu.edu) or Dom (dominique.deleon@gmail.com). It is going to be a great trip!

NOTE NEW DATE: FFiR program (all streams welcome!): Wed, 10/10: Jane Jacobs exhibit at Municipal Art Society

UPDATE: This program was initially announced for 10/3; it will now take place on 10/10.

In the 1960s, the neighborhood we live in was known as the "cast iron district," for the facades you can still see on many of the old warehouses that are now luxury lofts. For much of the decade, controversy swirled around this area because a powerful city planner named Robert Moses wanted to rip out a good number of these buildings and run an expressway directly across lower Manhattan the way he had in the Bronx.

One of his chief opponents was a writer and downtown activist named Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities had been published in 1961. Jacobs believed that New York needed to retain low-rise neighborhoods with dense populations and teeming street life and worried that a cross-town expressway would destroy rather than facilitate the possibility for downtown renewal. In the end, the cast iron district remained intact and the Lower Manhattan Expressway plan was scrapped for good.

The Municipal Art Society of New York just opened an exhibit that revisits Jacobs's legacy and asks what her vision of urban community may still mean for New York's future.

Join FFiR Bryan Waterman on Wednesday, OCT. 10, for a trip uptown to the exhibit. We'll leave from the lobby promptly at 6pm, so please be on time. The exhibit is open until 8pm that evening. For more info on the exhibit, with links to a calendar of related events (including panel discussions and walking tours all over town), click here.

BONUS: here's a link to a 16-minute film from the period, courtesy of archive.org, to give you some sense of the issues involved and how they were presented to the public during these debates. It's a little corny, but worth it, especially if you plan on attending the event. You can also view it directly here:

DOWNTOWN SCENES and DOUGHNUTS -- FIRST STREAM MEETING

The Downtown Stream will meet Wednesday evening, Sept 19, at 8:00 in the Broome Room.

Come meet your fellow streamers, RA, associated faculty, for a discussion of what to expect out of the year. Bring ideas for downtown events you'd like to see happen!

("Downtown," in this case, is a state of mind that might include many things happening in outer boroughs.)

We'll have treats on hand from the Doughnut Plant. See you there!

(Directly following we'll have an info meeting for the Downtown Book Club; see below for details.)

Do you know the East Village?

To Latino kids growing up in Alphabet City, it's still the LES, but real estate developers and hipsters have been calling it the East Village at least since the 1960s.

There's a great piece in today's Times about the history and ongoing class and property rights politics of the neighborhood, along with some audio/visual downloads and reading/viewing lists you might find fun.

Here's the start of the article, by John Strausbaugh:

FOR a long time the East Village was an urban frontier. The upper half of the Lower East Side, stretching from Houston Street north to 14th Street, and from Third Avenue and the Bowery to the East River, it was a toehold in America for generations of new immigrants — Irish, German, Jewish, Ukrainian, Puerto Rican and others — and a magnet for artists, bohemians, radicals and reformers. It has often been ravaged by grueling poverty and neglect. But it was also an area of intense cultural activity that changed the world.

Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s, new waves of affluent “immigrants” came to tame the frontier. Condominium towers reared up from blocks of old tenements. Many tenements themselves were renovated, with expensive rents and lofts worth more than a million dollars. Artists’ studios and corner bodegas gave way to chic shops and trendy bistros.

The East Village has been dragged up-market, but isn’t going without a fight.

Read the rest of the article here.

Click here for mp3 downloads of Strausbaugh's walking tour.

You can also find a video spot with some great footage here. Look for the piece called "Art and Unrest in the East Village"

What's happening on Mulberry Street?

80TH ANNUAL FEAST OF SAN GENNAROTO BE HELD SEPTEMBER 13– 23, 2007

The 80th Annual Feast of San Gennaro, New York City's oldest, biggest and best religious street festival, will be celebrated starting Thursday, September 13, and continuing for 11 days through Sunday, September 23, 2007.Presented annually since 1996 by Figli di San Gennaro, Inc., a not-for-profit organization, this year’s Feast will again bring more than 1 million people to the streets of Little Italy in the annual salute to the Patron Saint of Naples. The street festivities – including religious processions and parades, free entertainment, food stands and a professional cannoli-eating contest – are capped on September 19th with a celebratory Mass and candlelit procession as the Statue of the Saint is carried from its permanent home in Most Precious Blood Church on Mulberry Street."The 2007 Feast of San Gennaro will be bringing the world to Little Italy, and Little Italy to the world," said Joseph Mattone, Acting President of Figli di San Gennaro, Inc. "It is a time for remembrance and reconciliation, and a time for celebration. The good food, the free musical entertainment and the excitement will all be there. Join us to celebrate Little Italy and the Feast of San Gennaro."

More here.