Welcome to “Trailer Park,” our regular Friday feature where we collect the week’s new trailers all in one place and do a little “judging a book by its cover,” ranking them from worst to best and taking our best guess at what they may be hiding. This week, we’ve got an even dozen trailers for you, and most are for the kind of prestige pictures that the end of the summer movie season usually has us salivating for. Not to worry, though, fans of things that are awful: there’s also a new Ghost Rider. Check ‘em all out after the jump.
Almost exactly 40 years ago, Patti Smith gave her first poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. She took the stage with Lenny Kaye, the guitar player and music critic who went on to anchor the Patti Smith Band, with whom she has collaborated for the past four decades. As for the idea to pair her words with Kaye’s music, that came from Sam Shepard, who Smith was seeing at the time.
This is all a matter of historical record, recounted in lyrical and loving detail in Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids. But history came alive last night at New York’s 92nd St. Y, where Smith once again combined reading with musical performance — with Kaye and Shepard on hand to back her up.
1. Movies about the world sucking and/or ending dominated the weekend box office. [via Gawker]
2. “That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.” – an interesting interview with Damien Hirst in the Guardian
3. Check out the Frank Gehry-designed hat that Lady Gaga was rocking at Saturday night’s MOCA gala. (During a five-minute production by video artist Francesco Vezzoli, she debuted her new song “Speechless” on a piano decorated by Hirst.) [via LAT]
4. Adult Swim is allowing fans to customize their own DVDs; for $20 you get to pick 110 minutes worth of episodes, customize the box art, and then they put it together for you. [via Collider]
5. New fiction from Sam Shepard; an excerpt of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura [via The New Yorker; The Times]
Bernard Schwartz directs the 92Y Poetry Center, and chief among his vocational duties is putting together 92Y‘s legendary lineup of literary readings and events each year. Just as diehard Harry Potter fans lined up for midnight showings of Half-Blood Prince earlier this summer, 92Y tickets are coveted and eagerly awaited among lit nerds. This year’s agenda includes poet Charles Simic, novelist A.S. Byatt, Sam Shepard, John Irving, and other assorted writerly heavy-hitters. Tickets go on sale today, August 3, and cost $10 for those age 35 and younger. After the jump, Bernard Schwartz recalls some of the center’s highlights, invokes a maritime metaphor, and tells us what we can expect this season. Read More »
“To be perfectly honest, I was really excited to do True West,” director Isaac Byrne says of his current production for the Curious Frog Theatre Company. “The idea of doing it in a found space seemed really cool, too. The idea of doing it with an all-Asian cast — in the beginning, I was like, ‘Huh. OK.’ I was a little nervous that they wanted to do some heavy-handed political or social allegory. That wouldn’t have been the project for me. Read More »
Books: Google pays authors $60 bucks per scanned in book. Dance/Opera: Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson joins DWTS. Design: Gehry’s expensive new modeling software keeps building costs down. Film:Dark Knight‘s Christopher Nolan will do his own sci-fi project. Music: Justice design a Coke bottle, so sez Kanye. Television: It’s not just George and Izzie leaving ABC. Theatre: Sam Shepard pleads guilty to a DUI charge. Web: Can a Web site become a comedy show?
