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“Les sept planches de la ruse.” Photos by Richard Termine.

I write fortified with Riesling.

I have just been to see Compagnie 111 and Scenes de la Terre’s “Les sept planches de la ruse” (The Seven Boards of Skill) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it had its U.S. premiere as part of the Next Wave Festival. Call it theater, call it dance, call it cirque nouveau, whatever: no matter the genre(s), this was pure, enragingly empty, well-financed international spectacle, the kind BAM specializes in all too often these days.

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Rosas. Photos by Jack Vartoogian

So, ok, I have, maybe, from time to time, been a little bit snarky about the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, which might better be known these days as the “Greatest Hits from the Avant-Old-Garde.” Or maybe the Icons Festival. Take the title of last night’s show, for example: “Steve Reich Evening.” Come on, people.

But. This show. Is. Amazing.

It celebrates the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s relationship with Reich’s music. Lots (way too many) choreographers use Reich. It’s hard to take most of them seriously after you get a taste of the work De Keersmaeker has done. She is a masterful artist, and the response Reich elicits in her is breathtaking. The show runs through Saturday: get thee to the Icons Festival.

You’ve been reading here about the Droma Gypsy Festival, a festival of Balkan / East European / Roma (Gypsy) music that ends today, Friday at Drom (85 Ave. A, East Village).

The festival has brought in local, national and international bands. It’s feeding off a vibrant local scene that really came into its own at Mehanata, the notoriously rowdy Canal St. club that within the past decade evolved from a watering hole for local Bulgarians into a multicultural musical hotbed.

DJ Joro Boro, originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, was just another enthusiastic young Mehanata groupie. Then one night in an emergency he was drafted to DJ at the club - a gig which wound up lasting seven years. While at Mehanata he also co-produced a 2-cd collection of music from the burgeoning NY Balkan scene, Mehanata New York Gypsy Mania.

Joro Boro recalled the lively (understatement) scene at Mehanata’s original location on Canal Street.

Joro Boro laments that since the club moved to its new location on Ludlow St. on the Lower East Side two years ago it’s lost some of its individuality; it’s one hipster / youth bar among many on the block. And while plenty of great bands and artists still play there, the scene has spread out. In our conversation, we spoke about this change, also his thoughts on the very loaded term “gypsy.”

DJ Joro Boro will be spinning tonight at Drom, tonight being the final night of the Droma Gypsy Festival. Also on the bill: The boisterous Indian folk / Bollywood / wedding brass band Red Baraat Festival led by drummer Sunny Jain; and trumpeter (of Klezmatics fame) Frank London’s even bigger and more bombastic Klezmer Brass All-Stars. Joro Boro and London recently embarked on a collaborative project - there’s a chance they will do a little something together on Friday.

To help get you in the mood, here’s a downloadable Joro Boro mix:

“Lola Montes” is, in my unhumble opinion, the greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on this one proposition above all others.

Thus wrote the legendary film critic Andrew Sarris following a screening of Max Ophuls’ “ill-starred masterpiece” at the inaugural New York Film Festival in 1963. Based on the life of an actual 19th century courtesan but realized as an extravagant, dreamlike spectacle, “Lola Montes” tells the story of a fallen woman in the most exalted of styles. “To be moved by Lola Montes,” Sarris proclaimed, “is to feel the emotion in motion itself as an expression of a director’s delirium.”

Sarris was no stranger to polemics; this was, after all, the man who went to war with Pauline Kael over some shady business he imported from France. His estimation of Ophuls’ swan song, since retracted but no less forceful a statement of principles, abides as one of the most audacious throwdowns in the history of cinephila.

45 years later, the infamous film and its famous champion are back at the New York Film Festival. On October 4 - his 80th birthday - Sarris will introduce a screening of “Lola Montes” looking better than ever in a new digital restoration.

I spoke with Sarris about his ongoing love affair with “Lola” in all her incarnations - including her latest in the Governor of Alaska.

“Lola Montés” opens at Film Forum for a three-week run starting October 10. Check out their trailer.

The Droma Gypsy Festival at Drom brings together local, national and international musicians playing musical styles of Eastern Europe and Roma (Gypsy)-influenced music. I recently met some of the NYC-based artists participating in the festival, including Sanda Weigl.

Sanda Weigl is a diminutive, soft-spoken but stunningly powerful singer originally from Bucharest, Romania. Her family moved to East Germany where she became a state-sanctioned rock star - until she and friends protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which got her banned from singing, thrown in jail and ultimately booted out of the country. But despite her rock and roll moment, Sanda told me her lifelong passion is for songs she learned from Roma who hung out near her house when she was a child in Bucharest.

While she sang the songs over the years, she never recorded them until coming to New York many years later. On the resulting cd Gypsy Killer, Sanda’s stirring vocals are propelled by a stellar ensemble of “downtown” luminaries led by pianist Anthony Coleman. Sanda told me why being in New York, so far from the Roma source, inspired her to finally make a cd of her beloved childhood songs.

Sanda Weigl at Joe’s Pub, August 25, 2008

You can hear Sanda at the Droma Gypsy Festival (85 Ave A in the East Village) this Sunday, September 28 with Dotschy Reinhardt. Check out their website to see a schedule of shows going on from now until October 3.

The Droma Gypsy Festival at Drom brings together local, national and international musicians playing musical styles of Eastern Europe and Roma (Gypsy)-influenced music. I recently met some of the NYC-based artists participating in the festival, including the Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band.

The Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band (ZU) is a group that’s passionate about East European music and dance. Most have day jobs and many came to the music through the large US network of East European-style folk dancers. Belle Birchfield and Michael Ginsburg of ZU told us that they originally started playing brass band music in a class at the Iroquois Springs Balkan Music & Dance Workshop, an annual gathering of enthusiasts in Rock Hill, New York. The idea stuck to have a permanent band modeled on the rambunctious brass bands of the Balkans and especially Serbia, the true hotbed for this music. They’ve done quite well at it - the band has been invited to the massive annual Guca brass band festival and competition in Serbia four times.

When ZU got started in 1983 the Serbian connection seemed innocuous, but a decade later when Yugoslavia broke up and war broke out, the association with Serbia became a thorny issue.

Belle and Michael told me about a particular ZU concert in Serbia after the war. In front of maybe 50,000 people, the band found themselves alone on stage for 3 minutes waiting for a television interview to end.

The Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band

You can hear ZU at the Droma Gypsy Festival (85 Ave A in the East Village) this Saturday, September 27 with Polka Madre and DJs Nohmada. Check out their website to see a schedule of shows going on from now until October 3.

The month long (!) New York Clown Theater festival wraps up this weekend with a funeral procession. Converge at Bedford Ave. and North 7th Street (Bedford stop of the L Train) at 6pm on Sunday to join the parade. There is also another performance of Kill Me Loudly, a clown noir, at the Brick Theater tonight. I went last Friday and it not only made me laugh, but it cured me of all my blues proving once again that Clown beats therapy and Prozac every time. Here is a scene from the show:

Download Video

(You can hear my chat with the fabulous Soterios Johnson here)

Last week it was the opening of the Crossing the Line festival, this week it’s Prelude ‘08, the contemporary theater and performance festival, which began its three-day smorgasbord last night with a discussion entitled “Between White Cubes and Black Boxes: Performance, Place & Context.” Then everyone headed to a nearby karaoke joint to get sloshed:

If only all panels ended this happily (All Photos: Rachel Roberts)

The line of the night? This gem from artist Raul Vincent Enriquez: “I rarely have an intellectual take on things - I want them to be exciting.”

He was talking about his approach to making work (check out his moving feast, “A Burrito Truck,” this Saturday as part of Prelude), but, really, isn’t it the hope of every audience member upon settling in to see a show, whether it’s in a black box, white cube, empty lot or grand pavilion? As the art historian RoseLee Goldberg, another panelist, put it, “As much as we talk about how we should all move into these different realms, we have to remember the particular pleasures that drive us.”

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Just kidding, only ten.

1. Who cares?

People unembarrassed to use the phrase “mise-en-scene” in a sentence, who know their Akira Kurosawa from their Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and who (here’s looking at you, TFF) prefer quality over quantity.

2. I’ve never been to the NYFF. Why start now?

Two words: The Ziegfeld.

3. Good point. I definitely want to see “Wendy and Lucy” at the Ziegfeld rather than wait till it opens at the end of the year. But it’s totally sold out, right?

Probably. Members of the Film Society get first dibs on tickets, and the rest go fast, but if you’re really committed to see something it’s worth checking at the box office an hour or so before showtime for a stray seat. It happens.

4. An elitist, cheese-eating film festival on the Upper West Side, you say? I don’t suppose they’ve got any virtuoso ensemble pieces about upper-class French families having a meltdown? Preferably with Catherine Deneuve and/or Juliette Binoche? I just love them.

Do they? Do they ever! “Summer Hours”, from director Olivier Assayas, freshens up this dependable Gallic subgenre with a micro-attentive portrait of a family negotiating their affairs after the death of its matriarch.

Arnaud Desplechin, one of the quickest minds in the movies, surveys another ailing maman (Deneuve!) and her crazy offspring in “A Christmas Tale”. Personally, I found Desplechin’s last NYFF entry, “Kings and Queen,” a film with more at stake both emotionally and intellectually. There’s something a little forced about this tour-de-force, starting with yet another manic, sub-Leaud routine from Mathieu Almaric. But at this level of craft, it’s kind of moot point. I also prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad.

5. Conventional narrative is for suckers. What else you got?

As yet undistributed, Lucretia Martel’s “The Headless Woman” is the hardcore artfilm throwdown of the festival.

6. And if I want to shatter my counter-revolutionary bourgeois assumptions while simultaneously watching the single best film in the NYFF?

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, the astonishing 1978 manifesto/harangue/memoir/momtage by Guy Debord, the legendary theorist of Situationist International and a filmmaker of unequivocal genius.

7. Will the festival be showing one of the most beautiful movies ever made?

No. They’ll be showing two. “Lola Montes” and “Ashes of Time Redux.”

8. All in all, how does the 46th NYFF shape up against previous editions?

There’s nothing here as dazzling as “I’m Not There,” (class of ‘07), as sublime as “Syndromes and a Century” (class of ‘06) or as conceptually exciting as “Russian Ark” (class of ‘02). On the other hand, there doesn’t appear to be any egregious middle-brow junk along the lines of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” It may be true, as my former Village Voice colleague and NYFF committee member J. Hoberman writes this week, that “a festival can only be as good as what’s out there.” But it’s also only as good as its programmers, and the current crop are a feisty bunch decidedly weighted toward the more progressive spectrum of global cinema. Next week I’ll be posting a podcast conversation with Scott Foundas, junior member of the committee and possibly the youngest in NYFF history.

9. Uh, what’s up with this half-assed listicle? Aren’t you supposed to be a film critic?

Haven’t you heard?

10. But what about…? And…? Do you think…? WTF…?

Fire away in the comments.

Editor’s note: you can listen to Nathan Lee on the radio here

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Walter Reade Theater lately, where the press screenings of the New York Film Festival are being held. One of the most exciting things about the 46th NYFF, which opens this Friday, is a result of one of the most aggravating things about Lincoln Center just now: the major renovation and expansion project that has turned the corner of 65th and Broadway into a dusty, clanging, hulking mess.

So Alice Tully Hall is out as a NYFF venue - and good riddance; it’s a terrible place to see movies. The Walter Reade is accessible only by a narrow passage on 65th, and the great open spaces that connect the theater to the rest of Lincoln Center are blocked off. Faced with these inconveniences, the NYFF has come up with an inspired solution by partnering with the Ziegfeld, the grand and (relatively) glamorous movie palace on 54th.

Seeing, say, the exquisite new restoration of Max Ophuls’ lavish CinemaScope masterpiece “Lola Montes” at the Ziegfeld is a once-in-a-lifetime wonderment not to be missed. I mean, you could wait till it opens on the modest screens at Film Forum, or you could waltz into this:

Just as rare is the chance to see art house films like “Chouga” or “Four Nights With Anna” in an environment far more luxurious than the tiny screen they would grace at a humble downtown theater like Cinema Village - if they are lucky to be released at all.

So go go go to Ziegfeld before they turn it over to Spiderman 4 or whatever. And meanwhile I’ll be up at the Walter Reade for the ongoing press screenings, and as much of the splendid Nagisa Oshima sidebar as my schedule permits. And I’ll be loving it, noise, dust, inconvenience and all, cuz the Walter Reade is my favorite place in the world to see a movie.

It’s not as big as the gargantuan, spotless Pathe multiplex in Rotterdam. It not nearly as electrifying as the Grand Lumiere at Cannes. It isn’t charming like the Castro in San Francisco, or mind-blowingly picturesque like the outdoor screenings on the Piazza Grande at the Locarno Film Festival. Each of these holy sites of international cinephila holds a special place in my heart, but there’s something about the dependable, hometown perfection of the Walter Reade that can’t be beat.

Everything about the space is designed for a clear, unencumbered experience: the proportions of the room, the flawless sight lines, the total lack of distraction, the comfort of the seating, the immaculate projection and sound. I always take a seat all the way in the back, and it’s always utterly satisfying - even when, as once happened at a screening of avant-garde shorts, the print burned inside the projector.

Scrupulous as they are, I’ve always found the Titus theaters at MoMA uninviting. Plus you get the subway rumbling underfoot. The sight lines at Film Forum are lousy, and the red columns are a distraction. The IFC center has lovely theaters but obnoxious neighbors. The Museum of the Moving Image has a terrific room - or rather did before they closed shop for their own expansion project - but it’s not as big as the Walter Reade. I adore the spartan, boxy Maya Deren theater at Anthology Film Archives, but the seats are an absolute butt-buster.

I’ve got some gripes about the programming at the Walter Reade, a subject I’ll be addressing in a future post. But for now, as the NYFF unspools its gems, I’ve got no beef. Except for that damn 1/9 train it takes to get up there, and which stops like every three blocks.

You with me on this? Anything you don’t like about the Walter Reade? Got an alternative favorite? Any rapturous theater memories or horror stories to share?