Beat Nite All Stars, curated by James Panero

Beat Nite 9: All Stars
art spaces and galleries stay open late
curated by James Panero

produced by Jason Andrew
organized by Norte Maar

Fri, Oct 25, 6-10pm

After party at English Kills, 10pm-12am

Beat Nite …the most underground, exciting, and fiercely independent pockets of the New York art world. -ARTINFO

Beat Nite… Best Neighborhood-Wide Gallery Nite. -L Magazine

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Jason Andrew and Norte Maar bring back the late night in Bushwick with a limited edition of Beat Nite, featuring just 10 art spaces selected by guest curator of the night, James Panero, art critic and Executive Editor, The New Criterion. Beat Nite: All Stars will be held Friday, October 25, and selected spaces will be open 6-10pm followed by a huge after party at the venerated English Kills Gallery.

Beat Nite made its neighborhood debut in February 2009, featuring all of Bushwick’s alternative art spaces and galleries—at the time, only seven. The event grew into a biannual occurrence offering an awesome neighborhood-wide event that many have labeled “half art stroll, half bar crawl.” With over 50 galleries and alternative spaces now in Bushwick/Ridgewood, since 2012 Beat Nite has focused on a selection of the community’s many great offerings.

Beat Nite: All Stars highlights the new and emphasizes the alternative. Continuing these intentions we invited noted art critic James Panero to select spaces. Beat Nite: All Stars features just 10 art spaces and reflects his decision to include new spaces that have opened in the past year with some of the neighborhood’s veteran galleries: an “all star” lineup representing the art nexus of Bushwick / Ridgewood at its best.

__________________________Selected Spaces

Centotto

250 Moore Street, #108
Brooklyn, NY  11206
www.centotto.com

English Kills
114 Forrest Street, #1
Brooklyn, NY  11206
www.englishkillsartgallery.com

Lorimoto
16-23 Hancock Street
Ridgewood, NY  11385
www.lorimoto.com

Outpost

1665 Norman Street
Ridgewood, NY  11385
www.outpostedit.org

Schema
92 St. Nicholas Avenue
Brooklyn, NY  11237
www.schemaprojects.com

Signal
260 Johnson Avenue
Brooklyn, NY  11206
www.ssiiggnnaall.com

Silver Projects
796 Broadway, FL2
Brooklyn, NY  11206
http://silverprojects.org/

Storefront Ten Eyck
324 Ten Eyck Street
Brooklyn, NY  11206
www.storefrontbushwick.com

Theodore Arts
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn, NY  11206
www.theodoreart.com

Valentine
464 Seneca Avenue
Ridgewood, NY  11385
www.valentinegallery.blogspot.com

The Tanglewood Family Concert

Ozawa Hall at Dusk (Photo Credit: Steve Rosenthal)

Over the weekend I took my family to Tanglewood, the famous camp-like summer retreat of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lenox, Massachusetts. The occasion was Tanglewood's annual "Family Concert."

I grew up attending children's concerts at Lincoln Center, where the New York Philharmonic has been giving some version of their Young People's Concerts since 1922. Although I was too young to catch Leonard Bernstein there in his most famous role, some years later I watched the entire run of his wonderful televised series on DVD and had the pleasure of writing about it for National Review. Bernstein's great command of his Young People's Concerts leaves little doubt as to how he managed to captivate a television audience of 20 million--let alone the kids in Carnegie and Philharmonic Hall. His program ran for 14 seasons, from 1958 to 1972, and was broadcast in nearly 30 countries. The Kultur DVD reissue of the series is one of the best educational purchases you can make, by the way, for both children and adults.  

Family concerts are not only crucial to the future of classical music. They also play a foundational role in culture itself. They are the moments when young people recognize that great music is not a thing of history but one that lives in the present moment. It belongs to them, and can move them just as powerfully as it moved audiences in the past and will move audiences to come. 

Yet this connection is far from guaranteed, so for such concerts the stakes are high. Adults can wave off a poor performance. Children are far more impressionable, and a bad concert can leave a taste that lingers. Which is why, I fear, Tanglewood's dreadful family concert over the weekend may have just taught a new generation to hate classical music.

Performed in Ozawa Hall and (thankfully) only $10 per adult ticket, the afternoon concert provided a perfect opportunity to picnic at Tanglewood and enjoy the historic grounds, but things went bad as soon as the concert began.

The big problem should have been apparent to anyone at the Boston Symphony Orchestra with oversight of the program: A unamplified wind and brass quintet is unable to fill a soaring 1200-seat open-air auditorium. This is probably true no matter who is in attendance, but it is certainly the case when you are playing to a hall of restless children.    

The quintet's lackluster stage presense did not help. When not performing, the horn player, Rachel Childers, acted as emcee, but she was all talk, rattling on in a loud and goofy but entirely disconnected way--raising the ambient noise level in the hall before sitting down to resume the low-wattage musical performance.   

The concert's opening rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" went okay, what I could hear of it anyway, but the additional pieces were entirely lost on me. Half-way through, Childers introduced a "bonus track," which, after much ear-straining, I learned was Luciano Berio's "Opus Number Zoo." The piece involves orchestra members reciting lines between the notes. After Childers surveyed her unamplified performers, she said something like, "hope this works." Well, it didn't work, and, unless your thing is experimental theater, looking at someone on stage speaking inaudibly is a sure-fire way to lose interest.

The Tanglewood Family Concert is supposedly a special event. The concert the BSO put on would have been, at best, appropriate for a classroom performance. The takeaway, I had to explain to my daughter after we walked out on the finale, is not that classical music is always great. The lesson is that sometimes, even if I recommend something, it could still be really boring.

Why BSO and Tanglewood couldn't do much better this past weekend is a question that should go up and down the hierarchy of the organization. I'd recommend they start by watching Bernstein.    

James Kalm Reports: The Joe Bonham Project

The inimitable art videographer James Kalm has taken time out from his own exhibition to pay a visit to The Joe Bonham Project at Storefront Gallery. What results is a "Rough Cut" tour of this exhibition by Kalm and guest curator James Panero.