Rogovoy Report For 10/21/16

The weekend’s cultural highlights in the region include a film festival, a modern pop-cabaret legend, a groundbreaking performance artist, a reading by a former Village Voice critic, and a whole lot more.

New York City-based performance and visual artist John Kelly will perform a workshop version of “Time No Line,” his new solo live memoir, in Club B-10 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., on Saturday at 8pm. The program is based on personal journal entries about the East Village of the 1980s, gender performance, the culture wars, queer history, and more, and incorporates movement, projections, song, and spoken word.

A focus on Cuban cinema and premieres of new films by Ken Loach, Pedro Almodovar, Paul Verhoeven and Columbia County’s own Courtney Hunt, are some of the highlights of FilmColumbia 2016, offering an extraordinary lineup of international feature, documentary, independent, short, and children’s films from this Saturday through next Sunday at venues in Chatham and Hudson, N.Y. The films will be shown at the historic Crandell Theatre, the anchor of the festival’s screenings, and the Morris Memorial community center, both in Chatham, and at the Hudson Opera House in Hudson.

Folk-pop singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright performs an intimate, solo concert at Basilica Hudson on Saturday at 8pm. Wainwright is widely regarded as one of the best songwriters of his generation by his fellow musicians, critics, and audiences alike, and in addition to eight albums of his own songs and film soundtracks, he has written a classical opera and set Shakespearean sonnets to music for a theater piece by Robert Wilson. Wainwright’s concert is a benefit for Basilica Hudson, which was cofounded by his childhood friend, Basilica director Melissa Auf der Maur. The concert will be preceded by an onstage conversation between the two.

Folk-rock singer-songwriter Amy Rigby celebrates the 20th anniversary of her debut album, “Diary of a Mod Housewife,” which has become a modern classic, with a long-overdue vinyl release of the album and a concert at Spotty Dog Books & Ale in Hudson, where Rigby can often be found working behind the bar and cash register, on Saturday  at 8pm. Joining Rigby are husband Eric Goulden aka Wreckless Eric on bass, original “Mod Housewife” drummer Doug Wygal, and guitar wizard Alex Turnquist.

Matt Lorenz, the Northampton, Mass.-based indie-blues singer-songwriter who performs under the name The Suitcase Junket, bring his box of creative tricks to Club Helsinki Hudson tonight at 9pm. The Dupont Brothers, a sibling indie-folk-Americana duo, will warm up the crowd for the Suitcase Junket.

And finally, author, editor, and critic Laurie Stone will read from and discuss her new book, “My Life as an Animal, Stories,” at the Hudson Opera House on Saturday at 5pm. “My Life as an Animal” features a series of interconnected and comic stories that blur the lines between memoir, fiction, and cultural criticism. Through the book’s impressionistic style, it builds a narrative via seemingly unrelated anecdotes and observations. Its tantalizing challenge to readers is that what is being read may be autobiographical but may also be fiction, or fictionalized autobiography. The book is simply called “stories” on the cover and title page. In the end, whether it is “real” or “imagined,” it is gripping, narrative prose. The reading is free and will be followed by a reception and booksigning.

 
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