Whenever I hear Mahler's name, I remember someone saying or writing somewhere that the composer's lengthy and spectacular symphonies were the perfect soundtrack for the melodramatic, angst-ridden teenager. An odd way to put it, perhaps, but it does get at what grabs people when they hear his music and why they still want to listen to it a century after it was written. Mahler wrote big, big enough that it still washes over an audience with an awesome kind of sweeping force, big in the Russian novel sense, not the sappy Sunday Night Movie sense.
"A symphony must be like the world," Mahler said. "It must embrace everything." Just looking at his scoring, it seems he took the statement to heart. His Third Symphony (written largely during his summer vacations, several years running, near a lake in Austria) is his longest symphonic work and will be performed on Monday, Feb. 23, at Carnegie Hall by quite an amassed force of talent. Music director Christoph Eschenbach will lead the Philadelphia Orchestra plus the Women of Philadelphia Singers Chorale, the American Boychoir and Mezzo-Soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
Eschenbach, now comfortably into his first year at the helm of the world-famous orchestra, has embarked on a five-year plan to present all of Mahler's symphonies, culminating in 2007-08 with Symphony No. 8, the "Symphony of a Thousand" (and he meant that literally). Though most of the performances will take place in Philadelphia, the orchestra will repeat several of the programs here in New York.
Why Mahler? Why all nine of them? Eschenbach explains that he personally feels a close affinity to the composer's work. "I believe his music is right for our time. His work speaks to today's audiences with a unique clarity that has been distilled, rather than clouded, by the century since their composition."
The first movement of the Third Symphony clocks in at more than 30 minutes (equal to some symphonies in their entirety), but Mahler, inspired by a desire to reflect the whole world and celebrate all of nature and evolution, has a lot of ground to cover in one evening. By the time the applause starts over an hour and a half later, the music will have covered what rocks, flowers, animals, night, angels and love have told him. Difficult to express in words without getting mired in cliche, but as the composer is often quoted as saying, "If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music." Sensible enough.
In addition to the music, going to Carnegie Hall to me feels a lot like going to church?beyond the "real" reason for being there it's a chance to spend a couple hours in a place that seems too grand and beautiful for reality. Compared to the downtown scene, the ticket price on this one is a little unreal as well: $35-$98. While I can't pretend that it isn't nice to sit in a plush box along the first tier, the nosebleed seats that force your knees up under your chin can be fun too. You can always bring binoculars.
Either way, arrive early for a pre-concert talk at 7 with all-round Mahler expert, biographer and scholar Henry-Louis de La Grange.
Carnegie Hall, 881 7th Ave. (57th St. & 7th Ave.), 212-247-7800, 8, $35-$98.
Franz Ferdinand Thurs., Feb. 19 & Sat., Feb. 21 If you could eat hype, the four members of Franz Ferdinand would not be the wispy dudes that they are. They'd be orca-fat, a gang of Scottish dudes who look like they had consumed way too many shepherd's pies and deep-fried Mars Bars. NME put the band on its cover earlier this year and declared that these Glaswegians will "change your life." The Guardian raved that "Franz Ferdinand have made the most thrilling debut since the Strokes." Expectations for this band are somewhat high.
Franz Ferdinand have been compared to the Talking Heads, XTC and Gang of Four, but those comparisons are somewhat off. They don't sound like the Talking Heads or XTC as much as they sound like Hot Hot Heat aping those bands. They don't sound like Gang of Four as much as they sound like Radio 4 and the Liars recreating Gang of Four. On "Tell Her Tonight," Franz Ferdinand sound sort of like the Cure and the Clash, but what they really sound like is the Rapture appropriating the Cure and the Clash. The magic part is, the song's about 17,000 times better than anything the Rapture have created.
There are also parts of Franz Ferdinand's self-titled debut that sound exactly like the Strokes and turn into parts that sound cooler than the Strokes. When I listen to the standout opening track "Jacqueline," my first instinct is to wonder whether Franz Ferdinand have kidnapped Fabrizio Moretti and Albert Hammond, Jr. My second instinct is to wonder why the Strokes haven't written a song that's so perfect for pogo-ing and making out and throwing snowballs.
Franz Ferdinand won't change your life, no, but that doesn't much matter. Their music is simultaneously urgent enough and fun enough for you to worry and then dance your worries away. The thrill may wear off before the sun rises again, but at least the thrill was there.
Thursday at Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111, 11, sold out.
Saturday at Maxwell's, 1039 Washington St. (11th St.), Hoboken, 201-653-1703, 10, $10.
?Andy Wang
Dorff and Gausas Sat., Feb. 21 & Sat., Feb. 28 Lately, unscripted sketch comedy has been following an all-too-familiar script. A loud voice booms over the PA and introduces a group that invariably bears some cornball name. The members of said group then enter by dancing and bouncing around the stage with pep-rally glee before one of its members elicits a one-word suggestion from the audience. Show begins.
This intro, commonly taught in improvisational classes to loosen nerves and jazz up audiences, has become the stuff of amateurs. Veterans Kevin Dorff and Christina Gausas take the stage with almost a solemn confidence, knowing full well their quick wit, not their perkiness, will steal the audience's attention. Their two-person show, though unconventional, is perhaps the closest thing to perfect improvisational theater this side of Chicago.
The pair starts at opposite ends of the stage and takes turns uttering one-line, non sequitur thoughts based loosely on a suggestion from the audience. ("Money may not buy everything but having everything is sure better than having money.") They then seamlessly flow into scenes that are slow to build but brilliantly played out and never fully finished, leaving the audience craving more. Unlike traditional long-form improv, the scenes and characters are never revisited. Also deviating from custom, some of the show's skits are heavy on conversation and downright serious, the humor found in the characters and crazy worlds created.
The two actors make you trust them, and their commitment to scenes (even ones not apparently going anywhere) is remarkable. Dorff is a longtime comedian out of Chicago's Second City and currently a writer with Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Perhaps one of the most underrated comedy writers of the past decade, Dorff's ramrod figure is a feature character on Late Night (Coked-up Werewolf). Gausus, another Chicago transplant, has taught and been involved in improv for years.
Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, 307 W. 26th St. (8th Ave.), 212-366-9176, 8, $7.
?Lionel Beehner
Film Comment Selects Through Thurs., Feb. 26 The class act of the superb program "Film Comment Selects," now running at the Walter Reade Theater, was Thom Andersen's marvelous investigation into the heart of Los Angeles' cinematic life, Los Angeles Plays Itself (opening this summer at Film Forum). A film of cinematic detective work, Andersen's film uses the output of Los Angeles' most famous industry, the movies, as a means of exploring the history, hidden in front of our faces, of its host city. Andersen's film treats fiction films as documentaries in disguise, revealing the hidden life of the city they reviled, masked or ignored, but never adequately depicted. While Los Angeles is a profoundly pessimistic work, I'll be damned if I didn't come out of the theater walking on air, intellectually and emotionally exhilarated.
Los Angeles Plays Itself was the choice cut of the Walter Reade series, but a number of other highly worthy films are as yet still scheduled. Jacques Rivette's latest, The Story of Marie and Julien, is not quite his best work, but is nonetheless an affecting portrait of adult romance, leavened with traditionally Rivettian dread. A traditionally French relationship talkfest is dosed with free-floating paranoia, providing a dismaying sense of things mysteriously falling apart that is only unfamiliar if you've never seen a Rivette film before. Rivette's admixture of love and fear, recurring in almost every film the French master has ever made, is on full display here, and if the brew lacks the potency of Celine and Julie Go Boating or La Belle Noiseuse, it still packs a significant punch. And if there is a more beautiful and compelling performer in the French cinema than Emmanuelle Beart, please send names and home telephone numbers to me.
Andrew Cheng's Welcome to Destination Shanghai (one of two Cheng films being screened, along with Shanghai Panic), is an intriguing, idiosyncratic look at contemporary Shanghai. Through a series of vignettes, Welcome to Destination Shanghai sketches a world dominated by the hustle, both economic and sexual. Destination Shanghai is a portrait of a city in flux, a metropolis whose shantytowns are being razed to make way for high-rise hotels. Like any good student of modernization (and modernism), Cheng knows the process is fraught with conflict, and his camera captures much of this agonizing transition.
All Tomorrow's Parties, the second feature film from Yu Lik-Wai (best known as cinematographer for Jia Zhang-Ke's acclaimed Platform and Unknown Pleasures) is a surprisingly dull vision of a religious-dystopian China of the future. The title's Velvet Underground reference is clever, but the film's wit seemingly got lost somewhere between Lou Reed's Manhattan and the Far East.
165 W. 65th St. (betw. B'way & Amsterdam), 212-875-5600, call for times, $10.
?Saul Austerlitz
Bernardo Bertolucci Retrospective Through Sat., March 7 Just in time for the release of Bernardo Bertolucci's first film in six years, The Dreamers, the American Museum of the Moving Image has put together a complete retrospective of the Italian filmmaker's oeuvre. Beginning with the Pasolini-scripted The Grim Reaper, proceeding through his art-house apotheosization with such films as Before the Revolution, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris and 1900, and culminating with recent works like Stealing Beauty and Besieged, the AMMI series provides a widescreen perspective of the stylistic, political and intellectual changes of Bertolucci's 40-plus-year career.
One aspect of Bertolucci's work that has remained constant is his phenomenal dedication to pictorial beauty. A theme of much of Bertolucci's work is the dialectic of revolutionary ambition and enjoyment of the pleasures of high capitalism, and his films have a similarly complex effect on their audiences. Bertolucci is something of an orthodox Marxist, but his films are more interested in embracing the glories of the world. You know you're watching a Bertolucci film when the cocktail of luscious color, glorious camera movement and overwhelming sweep acts like an intoxicant, and your brain has only one desire: more. Bertolucci is a stylist above all, but his films sink or swim on the strength of their narratives, and some Bertolucci is distinctly more equal than others. Some of his films are downright silly; La Luna is an overblown, operatic story of incest, Stealing Beauty is pretty but empty; Little Buddha stars Keanu Reeves.
Bertolucci at his best is unmatched, rivaled only by those other grand stylists of post-WWII European filmmaking, Max Ophuls and Luchino Visconti, who also embraced, to greater or lesser extents, form over content. Must-sees in the AMMI series include Before the Revolution, made when Bertolucci was only 22, and very loosely based on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. While The Grim Reaper owed much to Pasolini and Italian neorealism, Bertolucci has always been an adjunct of the French New Wave and especially the work of Jean-Luc Godard, and this influence is distinctly registered in late 60s-early 70s work like Partner and Last Tango. Bertolucci's other major fascination, besides Marxism, is incest (go figure), and the taboo features prominently in Before the Revolution (aunt-nephew), La Luna (mother-son) and The Dreamers (brother-sister).
Required viewing as well are the charmingly mysterious The Spider's Stratagem, based on a Borges story; the swooning Fascist-era nostalgia film The Conformist; and Last Tango in Paris, which broke new ground in sexual explicitness onscreen. (Pauline Kael compared its premiere to that of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.) Less familiar to contemporary audiences, but also excellent, are the delightfully schizoid Partner, starring the downright strange French actor Pierre Clementi, and 1900, the five-hour epic of 20th-century Italian history, starring Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu.
American Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Ave. (36th St.), Astoria, 718-784-4520, call for times, $10.
?Saul Austerlitz
Mercury: the Afterlife and Times of a Rock God Through March 21 Who knew that the late Queen rocker Freddie Mercury was such a bitchy queen? That side of the rocker that was hidden from the limelight until he became the first rock star to publicly admit having AIDS is revealed in Mercury: The Afterlife and Times of a Rock God. Set at the time of his death in 1991, the one-man play is all about the battling dualities of the singer's on-stage persona and his real-life identity as Farook Bulsara. Expect lots of leather, lispy whining and a mound of mysterious white powder. The Triad Theatre, 158 W. 72nd St. (betw. Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.), 212-352-3101, 7, $30.
Wed. 2/18
An Albatross While listening to An Albatross' We Are the Lazer Viking for the first time (at work, on headphones), a woman sitting across the room asked if I could turn the CD down. Which gives a sense of the sound: loud, noisy, indigestible, yet at the same time bewilderingly dancey. Spastic noise-rock forcibly combined with synthesizers, described by one promoter as "death metal meets Devo"?but I only repeat that as a vague reference point. They differ from the likes of Dillinger Escape Plan, the Locust, etc., by stressing insanity over abrasiveness and from the range of "experimental" New York electro and indie-rock-turned-disco by not even smacking vaguely of 80s dance pop, Devo reference notwithstanding.
Some of the songs are built around completely solid rock 'n' roll guitar riffs filled out by synthesizer squeaks, electronic sound effects, horns? Others are just brief electronic seizures. You get a sense An Albatross are trying to have fun and be creative rather than commercial or punishing. Lyrically, vocalist Edward Gieda veers from gleefully moronic ("Baby, this rock 'n' roll/Baby, will save your soul/I am the Lazer Viking") to cuttingly perceptive ("I'll scream bloody murder/Just like I were five/Present it so safely/And pray it survives/Promote it and sell it/With a whole lot of sass/Hooray! Hooray! for the upper-middle class").
I'll give the benefit of the doubt that it's Situationist irony, but he's so loud and raw the voice is just another instrument anyway.
An Albatross are from Wilkes-Barre, PA, and band member Jay Hudak has noted that their somewhat remote location helps them remain apart from the venomous airs of competition sometimes evidenced by their contemporaries. It's also insulated them from the local-scene herd mentality that afflicts larger towns, giving rise to gluts of mediocre, interchangeably uncreative bands. Still, like everyone else, they're ultimately dependent on the city for business: They're signed to New York indie Ace Fu Records for distribution.
Hudak estimates the band tours four or five months out of the year, and from what I've gathered, they still regularly play all-ages shows, squats and basements. "If, some day, we played a late-night talk show," he told me, "I'd want to play a basement show the next night."
Knitting Factory Tap Bar, 74 Leonard St. (betw. Church & B'way), 212-219-3006, 11, $6.
?Philip Henken
Viva Zapata Hector Luis Rivera Jr., Kat Lo and other panelists discuss the 10th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising The panel will wax freedom-fighter poetic about this "milestone in liberation struggles for Mexico." Can gringos attend? Si, se puede! Brecht Forum, 122 W. 27th St., 10th fl. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 212-242-4201, 7:30, $6-$10 sugg. don.
Erotic Horror Stories The place is gonna be packed with Goth Betties and doe-eyed Stephen King fanboys clutching dog-eared copies of Anne Rice novels. The entertainment is author Polly Frost (whose name sounds like a brand antifreeze) and a trio of actors reading stories about being all scared and frisky. It's held at a bar, so load up on Bloody Mary's?spooky. Telephone Bar & Grill, 149 2nd Ave. (betw. 9th & 10th Sts.), 212-529-5000, 8:30, free.
Lewis Lapham The most alliterative Harper's editor ever is giving a reading tonight. More details, p. 27.
Erica Smith Not just another pretty girl with a Stratocaster. Erica's a breathy soprano that pleads, indicts and seduces a la Sandy Denny. Steeped in Americana and backed by a potent, jangly electric band, Smith's most recent material recalls the Byrds, the Church or Crazy Horse in less crazed moments. Onstage, her wise-ass nonchalance fits right in here at the East Village's most trendoid-free venue. Lakeside Lounge, 162 Ave. B (betw. 10th & 11th Sts.), 212-529-8463, 9:30, free.
Thurs. 2/19
William Gibson In his latest novel, Pattern Recognition, the reluctant king of cyberpunk brings things more down to Earth, focusing on the post-9/11 world of consumerism, the internet, conspiracy theory and paranoid obsession. What are those mysterious film clips that keep getting passed around online? What do they mean and where do they come from? Union Square Barnes & Noble, 33 E. 17th St. (betw. B'way & Park Ave. S.), 212-253-0810, 7, free.
Jack Welch Did he fire you and your entire family, or did he quadruple your net worth? Admire or loath him, former chairman and CEO of General Electric Jack Welch is still worth about 500 million times more than you are. At the low end. Tonight let him regale you with tales of downsizing and profit maximizing. 92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave. (92nd St.), 212-415-5500, 8, $25.
The Gossip Playing angry roadhouse Delta blues with a Bikini Kill swagger, one half-expects Courtney Love to issue a fatwa against the Gossip in response. In the tradition of the Bhagavad Gita, they are spokes in the Wheel of Punk Rebirth along with bands like the Blood Brothers, the show Jackass and that Winter X Games event that involves doing a backflip on a motorcycle. The Gossip's most recent album, Movement, shows the band taking their rootsy sound a little more toward the Stooges than Howlin' Wolf. Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard St. (betw. B'way & Church St.), 212-219-3006, 9, $13.
Fri. 2/20
The Match GAYme A dating show with a twist?homosexuality. We know, it's crazy! But still they manage to put on the show, involve the audience and give away prizes. The prizes are real, but the celebrities on display are merely impersonations. The laughter and joy you will experience is 100 percent genuine, though, so it all evens out. Duplex, 61 Christopher St. (7th Ave.), 212-255-5438, 11, $15/ 2 drink min.
Slick Rick At his show last month, Slick Rick got political on everyone's ass. Fresh from bitch-slapping the U.S. Department of Immigration, which sought to deport him on a technicality, Rick dropped knowledge about everything from media control to the Iraqi occupation. Could this man, the reigning "ruler" of rap, be making a run for the White House? Get educated at Rick's rally, held tonight at Southpaw. 125 5th Ave. (betw. St. John's & Sterling Pls.), Park Slope, 718-230-0236, 8, $22.
Sat. 2/21
DJ Gunars "Have you heard they're having anal sex in the suburbs now?"
I've just met a blondie from Maryland who has clued me in on this social phenomena. What else are they doing out there, beyond city limits?
"The other night, my friend showed me how she can smoke a cigarette out of her cooch."
I wanted to call HBO and tell them I had a new idea for a show. But then I remembered that this kind of show is playing 24 hours a day on the internet. Soccer moms are taking it up the butt from banker dads and filming it on digital cameras to be sold on the web.
All of this talk about sex stemmed from me pointing out the purple dildo next to the vodka at the bar. And what else is there to talk about with people you've just met? Jack Rabbit Slims, formerly Liquids, has a downtown mixed vibe of sex decor and decadence. Shhhhh. Don't tell that no-fun mayor of ours. He might get on the subway?or ride his bike?down to the club and stop everyone from engaging in sex talk.
Garvin, the promoter for Saturday nights at Jack Rabbits, thinks the new proposal for obtaining a nightlife license will ruin the industry. I stand outside, smoking, agreeing and asking who the DJ is.
The DJ is Gunars Elmuts, a photographer and filmmaker. He's got the crowd feeling his flavor of disco punk, sweaty funk and hiphop. Drunk girls are swinging and shimmying down two stripper poles set up on the leveled bleacher seating. Above them, a pair of chainsmoking Parliament Light party girls are grinding one another, holding on to subway strap handles attached to the wall. After trying to hold on to the adjacent strap and join the party, I was dismissed with "who the hell do you think you are" glares.
Alone and rejected, I went to the grab-claw game, which has a pile of sex toys in it. I tried winning the hot oil to present to the chainsmoking Parliament Light party girls, but my luck with that was the same as scoring a threesome.
I did feel lucky, though, in choosing Jack Rabbit Slims. It's only been open for a few months now, but better reflects the times than the posh Liquids did. With its stripped-down esthetics, the crowd is allowed to dance and not feel bad for refusing to buy a bottle and sofa time. There's no V.I.P., no pretentiousness, no bored-looking models.
The music of Gunars kept me longer, drunker and more broke than expected. His sound clash of old Zep rock riffs into Kelis' "Milkshake" were interesting. And danceable. I noticed he wasn't pulling that many records out of his crate, though, while mixing. He later would tell me of a new program he's been using called Final Scratch, which allows you to transfer digital mp3 files onto special vinyl in seconds. All you need is a laptop, turntables and a mixer. That eliminates the crate problem and having to play CDs, which tend to skip and don't produce a very warm sound.
Like the mayor. (Bah-doom boom chhhhh!)
Jack Rabbit Slims, 266 E. 10th St. (betw. 1st Ave. & Ave. A), 212-677-1717, 10, free.
?Dan Martino ([soulstatik@hotmail.com](mailto:soulstatik@hotmail.com))
Animal Collective The core members of Animal Collective's changing lineup, Avey Tare and Panda Bear, grew up in the pastoral exurbs of Baltimore before moving to Brooklyn. The rural elements of their upbringing still figure prominently in the band, from the bucolic stage names?a recent addition to the group goes by the name Geologist?to the pastel forestscapes depicted on the cover of their latest full-length, Here Comes the Indian.
Yet what's most interesting about the band is how they've allowed the city to creep in. Their early records, since re-released as a double-disc set on Fat Cat, were idyllic acoustic affairs full of wistful melodies shrouded in clouds of static. Now, slabs of industrial clamor whoosh in and out as heavy drums?sounding more like a refrigerator assembly line than a hippie drum circle?and wild human yelps (Fritz Lang's underworld proles, not backwoods tribesmen) carry the songs forward into shifting shapes.
Even the nature of their collectivism feels urban. Like post-punk doomsters Public Image, Ltd., who claimed to have been a communications corporation and not a rock group, Animal Collective control all aspects of their output, from album art to self-releasing their music. Also like PiL, each of their records feels like an esthetically complete commodity.
But should you go to their show? That's hard to say. At a performance last year in Chicago, Avey Tare and Panda Bear shrieked like monkeys and hammered endlessly on a snare drum; that was it, for nearly an hour. Audience members glanced discreetly at one another, unsure of whether they were even watching the right band. That confirmed, most breezed for the exits. I stuck around just long enough to feel duped.
In the heavily ritualized world of rock shows, where the musicians and audience alike rarely deviate from what is expected from them, a performance like that is jarring. But what I mistook for a band extending its conceptual shtick into the realm of kitsch was actually something else. The show was a reminder that anything can, and everything might, happen onstage. Confusion is as important as any other emotion in rock?and Animal Collective, with the mysterious beauty of their records and the chaotic absurdity of their live shows?elicit that response better than anybody. With Numbers and Trin Tran.
Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard St. (betw. B'way & Church St.), 212-219-3132, 10, $10.
?Dustin Roasa
Edgar Winter Band Since political correctness killed the honest American tradition of the freakshow, it's been next to impossible to find nature's amazing accidents on display. To stem the tide of this moral prudishness, B.B. King's is putting an Albino on display. He apparently sings blues and rock songs, too, so this will be a shuck and jive display the likes of which you've never seen. 237 W. 42nd St. (betw. 7th & 8th Aves.) 212-997-4144, 8, $30, $25.50 adv.
Improv Secrets So you've been playing drums and percussion for a while and can lay the beat down as natural as breathing. But anytime you try to think outside the boom-boom-bap box, you get lost. Percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo will get you to flow with advice and commentary on technique, style and execution. The Iridium Room locale amps up the jazz-bo intensity. 1650 B'way (51st St.), 212-714-7722, 12, $49, $39 adv.
Mary Timony Ignore her sweet baby-face pout and her hippie-fantasia lyrics. Timony is probably the smartest chick in rock and her complex songs and arrangements should earn her much greater success than she's gotten. Sometimes she sounds like a Sonic Youth by way of Suzanne Vega, sometimes she doesn't. Go see her and support the rare artist who isn't in it for the money or the pussy. Knitting Factory, 74 Leonard St. (betw. B'way & Church St.), 212-219-3006, 9, $8.
Sun. 2/22
Peter Popoff When he's not dying for our sins or starring in revisionist celluloid epics, Jesus can be found on late night television saving us from the pinch of Bush economics. In exchange for your personal information, televangelist Peter Popoff of People United for Christ will send you a vial of miracle water, some communion wafers and a step-by-step guide to financial bliss. Just follow the detailed instructions (sample: "anoint the doorposts of your house with this miracle water") and God will shower you with torrents of cash. Leave it to Yahweh to accomplish what three years of Paul Krugman columns have not. Catch Popoff's infomercial at midnight on BET. Free, w/price of cable.
Eminent Dom-Aid Hundreds of Prospect Heights residents losing their homes to create parking lot space for the Nets' new Brooklyn arena. But the real tragedy is the one that may befall beloved Brooklyn institution Freddy's Bar & Backroom. To help celebrate the bar's glorious life and impending sports-related death, they're hosting an afternoon of musical civil disobedience. A dozen bands will provide the backdrop for what we're sure will be many toasts to Bruce Ratner's health and the Nets' success. 485 Dean St. (6th Ave.), Brooklyn, 718-622-7035, 3, $10 sugg. don.
Mon. 2/23
Subjective Theatre Company Benefit Though they're one of New York's better off-off Broadway companies, the Subjective Theatre Company performs for free, making them one of the less-solvent troupes around. But they do put on kick-ass benefits. This one includes belly and hip-hop dancers, a magician who does stuff with razor blades and the always-awesome Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. Help 'em out and see some skin in the trade-off. We won an ice cream cake last time! Bar 13, 35 E. 13th St. (University Pl.), 212-979-6677, 7, $10 incl. free drink.
Dweezil Zappa & Lisa Loeb Remember Lisa Loeb? She's the geeky chick who had a minor MTV hit in the mid-90s, and poindexters everywhere developed a big crush on her and her glasses. Then she put out a couple more records and got involved with that whole "Lilith Fair" thing. And remember Dweezil Zappa? No one ever had a crush on him. And through project after project, he continues to prove to the world that he's not his father. Well, they're playing together, and charging admission. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111, 9, $15.
Ward White On his new CD Lovely Invalids, Ward White comes across as something of a musical John Cheever, sardonically skewering soulless Manhattan careerists, self-centered squeezes and sell-outs of every stripe. The music falls somewhere between Wilco and early Bowie, punctuated by White's fast, incisive lead guitar and keyboardist Amy Schneider's warm, fluid organ fills. Fans of Elvis Costello, Matt Keating and anybody who misses Lloyd Cole's frequent shows here in the mid-90s should check him out. With Joemca, the Big Creak, Red Halo. Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Ludlow & Essex Sts.), 212-260-4700, 7, $8.
Tues. 2/24
The U.S. and the U.N. Half of the Republican party wants to blow up the United Nations, and they just may get a chance soon, as they're planning to rebuild the thing anyway in a couple of years. Tonight, the director of the World Policy Institute at New School University, Steven Schlesinger, outlines the "important role played by the U.S." and its "obligations going forward." NYU Vernon Center, 58 W. 10th St. (betw. 5th & 6th Aves.), res. req., 212-992-9091, 6, free.
The Hebrew Hammer Missed it at the Angelika? Missed it on Comedy Central? Missed any of the 100-word reviews that would probably substitute for seeing the damn thing? Here's another chance to catch Jewsploitation like your mom used to make it. Makor, 35 W. 67th St. (betw. Columbus Ave. & Central Park W.), 212-601-1000, 7:30 & 9:30, $9-$15.
Contributors: Ned Berke, Adam Bulger, James Fleming, James Griffith, Jim Knipfel, Dustin Roasa, Alan Young and Alexander Zaitchik.