UWS Weekend: Great Things To Do in (and Near) the Neighborhood

By Tracy Zwick

This weekend I’ll be finishing up Sally Rooney’s “Intermezzo,” which we discussed last week, and though Giants fans have the weekend off with Big Blue having played last night,we Bears and Jets fans will be on duty Sunday. Still, there’s plenty of time for movies at the New York Film Festival and some art.

Let’s Weekend!

September 27 – 29, 2024

New York Film Festival: September 27 to October 14 at multiple Lincoln Center venues; for times, locations and tickets visit the website

It’s not every weekend that one of the world’s most prestigious and influential film festivals arrives in your backyard! So look over the schedule and grab some tickets for the 62nd iteration of the New York Film Festival. There are free talks, brand-new restorations of essential classics, documentaries, international films, and, of course, premieres.

I’ll be spending three-and-a-half hours this Saturday with an in-the-know editor friend at “The Brutalist,” a film by American director Brady Corbet about a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor (Adrien Brody) navigating postwar America while confronting themes of privilege, identity, and historical trauma. Like many films in the festival, it will be followed by a Q&A with the director and lead actors.

Did you enjoy “Challengers”? How about “Call Me by Your Name”? If so, perhaps you’d like to join me in the audience of Luca Guadagnino’s latest, “Queer,” a period drama set in Mexico City that received an 11-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. It’s drawn from William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel and follows a solitary American junkie (Daniel Craig) who becomes infatuated with a new-to-town younger man (Drew Starkey). Lesley Manville and Jason Schwartzman also feature.

I don’t have tickets yet, but I’m interested in Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and “Maria,” the Maria Callas biopic with Angelina Jolie in the lead. How about you? Add the NYFF films and events that pique your interest in the comments!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Open every day except Wednesday, 10-5, with late hours on Fridays and Saturdays (open till 9:00 p.m.); 1000 Fifth Avenue; pay what you wish for NY residents

It’s easy to forget that we have one of the world’s premier, encyclopedic museums of art just a five-minute ride across town on the M86. I was at the Met for the fall launch last week and I can tell you: there is a panoply of exhibitions, events, and objects freshly arrived, reinstalled or newly contextualized this season. You could spend a lifetime at the Met and not see everything in the collection. I give occasional tours and talks at the Met and these are a few things I recommend:

• Curator extraordinaire John Carpenter talks with architect and author Naomi Pollock this Sunday about “Art and Architecture of the Modern Japanese Home,” 2:00 p.m. in Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium (free with museum entry).

• Do not miss the collection of Cycladic sculpture that wowed critics and visitors when it went on view last winter as part of a 25-year loan agreement with the Greek government. It’s some of the oldest figurative work at the Met, and the smallest, confirming the notion that a work of art doesn’t have to be large to be hugely moving. These objects were made in a group of islands in the Aegean Sea east of Greece between about 5300 B.C. and 2300 B.C., the beginning of the Bronze Age, and many were made by women. As Jerry Saltz wrote, they offer “more proof that the first great artists may have been women.”

• There’s one more month to see the rooftop commission by Petrit Halilaj, “Abetare,” which closes October 27. Whether you like these wiry sculptures or not, you’ll love the views from the Met’s roof, and a snack or drink from the Roof Garden Bar can be a good way to break up your art viewing, or an opportunity to think or chat about what you’ve already seen.

• Did you know the Met has the most comprehensive public collection of baseball cards outside of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York? I’ve yet to see them, but I’m making plans to take my 12-year-old card-collecting nephew.

• One of my favorite pieces in the contemporary Japan collection is Kohei Nawa’s “PixCell Deer #24”, which has been off-view for about two years. It’s back, and it’s such a showstopper it has an entire gorgeous gallery to itself. “PixCell Deer #24” is built on an actual taxidermied deer covered from antlers to tail with glass beads of varying sizes that reflect light, but also seem to emanate light. They act as lenses, intensifying and contorting what we see. It reminds us that we see everything through lenses – our eyes – and they can amplify and distort reality.

• Another jewel of the Met’s collection has left its regular gallery: Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” was the most expensive painting the Met had ever acquired when it was purchased 20-odd years ago, and I make a point of taking friends and family to see it when we visit. The good news is it hasn’t traveled far. It’ll be one of the centerpieces of “Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350,” which is currently being installed and opens for previews on October 10th. There are only 4 or 5 extant works in the world attributed to Duccio, and the diminutive “Madonna and Child” will be joined by a majority of those other works, which have been loaned to the exhibition. One of the most anticipated shows of the year, “Siena” will bring together treasures that presaged the Florentine Renaissance, and expectations are sky high. As Holland Carter, co-chief art critic for the New York Times wrote of this work, “sublime’s not a big enough word for it.”

Saying Goodbye to Summer with Local Favorites

On a personal note, my daughter heads back to college this weekend. I’m lucky. University of Chicago’s autumn quarter begins September 30, whereas most colleges started weeks ago. With her friends long gone, she’s had little choice but to hang with me this last, perfect stretch of summer. And I’ve loved it. The happy days “pass uncounted, until they end,” as Michael Gerson wrote in his magnificent essay about saying goodbye to our former infants. So if you see a lady whose eyes look leaky in Riverside Park, or walking chin-to-chest in a haze of nostalgia on Broadway, please understand. Before my girl flies the coop, we’ll visit some of our neighborhood standbys. Maybe Fumo for her favorite chicken parmesan. If there’s time, a mani-pedi at Cologo Nails and Spa, or a trim from Joe Vitale at Gerard Anthony Salon, who’s been cutting our hair since before her bat mitzvah, for which his husband, makeup artist Nevio Ragazzini, did her tween-age glam. And she’ll head to the airport with lox on an egg bagel from Absolute. She’s got their baseball cap on a hook in her apartment in Chicago. A little piece of the UWS and home on her head, and, I hope, in her heart.

Please send your ideas for future WSR Weekend columns to info@westsiderag.com

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