If the meteorological aphorisms of old wives are to be believed, March right now should be a docile and soft baby lamb singing “Circle of Life” with the voice of James Earl Jones. It’s a chimera, silly! This week the soft and strong commingle: tofu meets anarchy, folk meets rock and scenes of post-industrial Brooklyn meets elegiac brush strokes.
Alexa Wilding
Mar. 11, Highline Ballroom, 431 W. 16th St (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-414-5994; 8, $12
In a pixie and naïf soaked sonic world, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s little room left for another chanteuse. But Alexa Wilding combines the haunting qualities of The Child Ballads with a Leonard Cohenian sense of wordplay and there’s some rock ‘n’ roll in there too—for a while Wilding played with former Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert in Int’l Shades.
Bottom Line: Sometimes you need just a little dainty comfort to stop the bleeding in your ears.
Tales of Tofu
Mar. 15, EN, 435 Hudson St. (at Leroy St.), 212-647-9196; 2, $85. Tofu can either be a sublime mouth explosion or, when my mom makes it, a dreaded dinner. At EN, a Japanese Brasserie on the West Side, it’s the former. The kitchen makes tofu fresh every day, and on Sunday, chef Yasuhiro Honma reveals the secrets of what makes his bean curd better than the others. At $85 it’s a pricey secret to learn, but Honma promises to teach you how to make tofu at home and share the history of the gelatinous heaven cloud.
Bottom Line: Give a man tofu once, and he’ll eat for a day.Teach him how to make tofu, and he’ll do that once a week for a while.
In Real Life
Mar. 14, Capricious Space, 103 Broadway (at Berry St.), Brooklyn, 718-384-1208; noon, FREE Laurel Ptak, the founder of Iheartphotograph.com and curious curatorial talent, mounts a show with a bunch of her artsy Internet friends.The result, IRL, explores how the very worthwhile practice of online curation might look in a traditional gallery setting.This Saturday, Ptak seeks to assemble the largest archive of photographs ever transmitted by fax machine.Bottom Line: The vanguard of curatorial praxis just steps away from Diner.You could watch it online but better to be there for burgers, which are a moment’s walk away.
Rebels, Reactionaries and the Making of American Freedom
Mar. 12, Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway (at E. 12th St.), 212-473-1452; 7, FREE As much as n 1 is staffed exclusively by proud-as-peacock self-satisfied assholes, occasionally a true blue gifted intellectual who is accessible and young and has good ideas has the misfortune to get caught up in its web. The latest victim is Jedediah Purdy, a law professor and author of For Common Things, who tonight speaks about his newest book, A Tolerable Anarchy, which explores freedom and America’s weirdo conception of it. Bottom Line: Stay for Jedediah, but be sure as shit to leave before the Q&A session.
Greg Lindquist’s Brooklyn Industry
Mar. 11, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Ave. (at Ashland Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; 6, FREE Like Hilda and Bernd Becher photographs, Greg Lindquist’s paintings amplify the emotive potential of inanimate objects. Lindquist’s muted paintings feature images of post-Industrial Brooklyn or rather, the transitions and translations of Brooklyn becoming less industrial. “Ikea,” “Repackaging Moderninsm” and “Monumental Parking” (pictured), a tableau of cranes and mounds, is part Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and part a critique of the destruction inherent in consumerism.Bottom Line: Don’t cancel your date with IKEA just yet, but do ponder the consequences of its easy parking whilst staring at Lindquist’s canvasses.
