The Smart Set is a weekly feature, compiled by Lauren Cerand, that usually appears Mondays at 12:30pm and highlights the best of the week to come. Special favor is given to New York’s independent booksellers and venues, and low-cost and free events. Please send details to lauren [at] maudnewton.com by the Thursday prior to publication, with the event’s date in the subject line.
TUESDAY 1.2: At McNally Robinson, “Join Mark Crispin Miller and Peter Rost for a discussion of Rost’s The Whistleblower. McNally Robinson Booksellers is restarting their First Tuesdays political series, hosted by Mark Crispin Miller. The goal of the series is to
highlight issues-oriented titles that may be a little too dangerous to receive a great deal of mainstream media attention, and bring the authors into conversation with their customers. 7:00pm, FREE. Also, Les Ballets Trockadero at The Joyce: “When Leonide Massine choreographed Gaite Parisienne for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1938, he probably never imagined that the colorful female characters in a fashionable Parisian cafe would be danced by male primo ballerinas in size 12- pointe shoes.” 7:30pm, $44. And, “America Fantastica: Art, Literature, and the Surrealist Legacy in Experimental Publishing, 1938–1968” at the Museum of Modern Art, through January 22.
WEDNESDAY 1.3: Joanna Fuhrman & David Shapiro read from their work at the Poetry Project. 8:00pm, $8. Check out jen bekman [where, full disclosure, as always: I am the gallery’s PR director] for The Girl’s Room, an exhibition of arty art on the cheap cheap (lots in the $200 range, with nothing more than $800). Through January 13.
THURSDAY 1.4: “Created in 1965, Fresh Tracks is Dance Theater Workshop’s longest running series of new dance and performance.” 7:30pm, $20. And, at Julie Saul, new work by Brian Ulrich: “In 2001 citizens were encouraged to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy through shopping, thereby equating consumerism with patriotism. The Copia project, a direct response to that advice, is a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live” [thanks to ms. personism for the tip!].
FRIDAY 1.5: At KGB, “kick off the new year with an evening of readings from Barrelhouse issue three… Come see/hear authors Greg Ames, Joe Oestrich, Paul Hostovsky, Catie Rosemurgy, and Wendy Wimmer.” Highly recommended. 7:00pm, FREE. And, gather round ye cosmic Americans: I’m a live wire/ I’m a shortwave radio/ Do you copy?…Anais Mitchell plays Pete’s Candy Store. 9:45pm, FREE.
SATURDAY 1.6: At P.S. 1, “Music is a Better Noise brings together musicians who make art and artists who make music, or for whom music is an integral part of their creative process.” Through January 29. Uptown, João Carlos Martins conducts the Bachiana Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. 8:00pm, “priced at one dollar a ticket to help raise the consciousness of New Yorkers about the preservation of the Amazon Rain Forest and its crucial role in the earth’s environment, through ARPA – Amazon Regions Protect Areas – the most important conservation program of the Planet.”
SUNDAY 1.7: At Miguel Abreu Gallery: Patience … Fortitude, an exhibition of mixed media work by Sam Lewitt. Through January 21. And, literary adaptions abound at the cinema (or the multiplex): Notes on a Scandal, Perfume, and The Painted Veil are all showing now.
UPCOMING:
— “Life is not like a novel,†…but an opera maybe? Don’t miss Eugene Onegin at the Met (if that’s your thing; it’s totally my thing).
— “I Love Dan Flavin… a tongue-in-cheek retro futuristic dance with fluorescent light and techno music pioneers Kraftwerk.”
— David Byrne, Songs from Here Lies Love: “selections from his new multimedia song cycle written in collaboration with DJ Fatboy Slim — Here Lies Love. The songs invoke the life of Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines, and the servant who raised her.”