Weekly Culture Roundup: 10/4 – 10/10
It’s October, so you know what that means: All Hallow’s Eve is coming. Amidst the Fall foliage and increasing appearance of jack-o’-lanterns, we’ve got plenty for you to see and do this week, Halloween-related and otherwise.
Antisocialites — Starting the week off, Brooklyn Steel hosts two darlings of the Canadian indie rock scene, headliners Broken Social Scene and Alvvays. Broken Social Scene are an amorphous collective of various artists each originally hailing from separate projects such as Metric, Feist, and Stars. They’ve been around since the late 1990s and continue to evolve and transform their eclectic sound as often as their lineup ebbs and flows. Alvvays are coming off the release of their second album, Antisocialites, that sees their blend of garage rock and dream pop going deeper and darker than before, plumbing the chilling emotional depths of lead singer Molly Rankin’s own personal reflections while uncovering Alec O’Hanley’s macabre, distorted guitar sections reverberating beneath the glossy overtones set by keyboardist Kerri MacLellan.
Brooklyn Steel 10/4 & 10/5
Broken Social Scene Tickets
Alvvays Tickets
Can You Survive? — Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, aside from taking inspiration from real-life serial killer Ed Gein, was entirely a work of fiction, despite being initially marketed as a true story. Nonetheless, its oppressively nightmarish atmosphere and relatively bloodless carnage still, to this very day, manage to induce non-stop dread and genuine anxiety in even the most jaded of viewers. Before Michael Myers, before Jason Voorhees, and before Freddy Krueger, there was Leatherface: the original masked murderer, now an infamous symbol of the then newly emergent slasher genre. Having permanently impacted film history and resonated with the decimation of socio-cultural norms during its time of release, Nitehawk Cinema celebrates its lasting legacy with a midnight screening of the film on a 35mm print—just in time for the start of the Halloween season.
Nitehawk Cinema 10/6 & 10/7 Tickets
Profiling the Profilers — In the Department of Justice’s 2015 investigation into police behavior following public unrest in Ferguson, Missouri in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, they found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.” Among other impropriety, the report determined that the department deliberately targeted black residents, treating them as a consistently lucrative source of revenue for the city due to funds derived from fees and fines. Findings such as this will be among the topics of discussion at Brooklyn Museum’s latest “Brooklyn Talks” program: a conversation between scholar and MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler and civil rights attorney and author Michelle Alexander about Butler’s new book, Chokehold: Policing Black Men, presented in conjunction with the museum’s “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America” exhibition.
Brooklyn Museum 10/5
Event Details
Daybreak Gray and Dim — In Walt Whitman’s remarkable Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, he used the ferries that transported New Yorkers to and from Brooklyn prior to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge as an extended metaphor for the perilous journey of the soul in the time leading up to the start of the American Civil War. Within the work resides a central query: “What is it, then, between us?” Composer and conductor Matthew Aucoin explores the various notions of “us” in his operatic interpretation of Whitman’s original work, Crossing: a chamber-piece that imagines Whitman in a Washington DC hospital, involved in an emotional relationship with a young wounded Union soldier and tormented by the agonizing wails of the ward’s inhabitants. It’s worth keeping in mind the first stanza of the titular poem, an earnest address to future readers conveying the relevance of Whitman’s verse no matter the time: “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”
BAM 10/3-10/8
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Being Beauteous — Grammy-nominated orchestral collective The Knights are an eclectic group of extraordinarily talented musicians dedicated to transcending traditions and exploring the multifarious joys of classical music. They’ll be joined by special guest tenor Nicholas Phan for their latest performance of Britten’s Les Illuminations, a historic song cycle that bridges sensuous romanticism and striking totality to transport audiences to a musical realm of bliss and thorough contemplation of self. Experience them at the BRIC House Ballroom, on Thursday, October 5.
BRIC 10/5
Event Details