Saturday, August 23, 2014

Last Showing Of 2014 Roosevelt Island Outdoor Movie Series Tonight At Firefighters Field - Playing A Necessary Music Starring Local Residents, Goldfinger With Sean Connery Too - Vote On 2015 Outdoor Movie Theme

Still Image of A Necessary Music from Rotterdam International Film Festival

The Roosevelt Island 2014 Summer Outdoor Movie Series final showing is tonight with Goldfinger, starring Sean Connery as James Bond preceded by a very strange short film, A Necessary Music, about Roosevelt Island.

Image Of July 12 Showing Of Marvel's The Avengers At Firefighters Field

According to the Roosevelt Island Operating Corp (RIOC)
Saturday, August 23rd, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation presents the FINAL film in the Roosevelt Island Outdoor Summer Movie Series: James Bond in Goldfinger! Join us on Firefighter's Field at 7 PM for music, film trivia and night of movie fun under the stars. Food and drink will be available for purchase, bring a blanket or lawn chair.

Before the feature begins, RIOC will present a showing of "A Necessary Music," a unique short film shot on Roosevelt Island that showcases local talent. We hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

Roosevelt Island Operating Corp Advisories Group

Here's the trailer for Goldfinger.



Goldfinger is a very good film but the highlight for tonight has got to be the showing of A Necessary Music, starring many of our neighbors here on Roosevelt Island.

According to A Necessary Music web site:
A FILM ABOUT ROOSEVELT ISLAND NEW YORK
A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.

Roosevelt Island is a small sliver of land situated between Manhattan and Queens, intersected by the Queensborough Bridge. Formally known as Welfare Island and originally home to New York's largest insane asylum, a small pox hospital, and a range of other 19th century municipal facilities for incarceration, it now houses one of the cities most visible, yet little-known modernist social housing projects. The subject of several architectural competitions during the 1960's that employed the island as a laboratory site, proposing a range of re-imagined futures, from a floating casino, to a Museum of Egyptian Artifacts, to a cemetery, to a Disney-like water and entertainment park, its current status is the result of the winning entry of Philip Johnson. Johnson's master plan proposed a mixed income, enclosed utopian community; a bucolic concrete enclave, divided into three residential developments.

Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York's Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Casting seveteen residents to enact these lines accompanied by a fictional narration take from Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1941 science fiction novel 'The invention of Morel', the film deploys fiction as a tool to frame and activate its site. Self-consciously dissolving from attempted realism to imagined narrative, what begins as a process concerned with sociality becomes instead a ethnographic fiction about place and community, and an investigation into representation itself.

A Project by artist Beatrice Gibson, developed in collaboration with composer Alex Waterman. Narration by Robert Ashley.
More on A Necessary Music from this 2009 post.

You can also vote to pick the theme of next year's Roosevelt Island Outdoor Movie Series:
  • Fantasy Films: Movies with Imagination,
  • I Love the 80's,
  • Roosevelt Island: The Final Frontier,
  • Traditional Tales with a Brand-New Twist or
  • Classics from Hollywood's Golden Age
Vote here.

4 comments :

Frank Farance said...

NotMyKid, you don't realize your own racial/ethnic bias: "the vast majority of people that were locked up were male blacks" so then one assumes (pre-judges, i.e., prejudice) that when stopping a black male, he is likely to be a criminal, yet 88% of the stops are "totally innocent".


By your reasoning, hiring men makes more sense (since most of the people working for you are men), yet it turns out 88% of them are failures at their work. One would ask, why aren't more women hired?


Simply, your stop-n-frisk criteria is based upon the distribution of blacks/latinos in crime, not based upon their actual likelihood of committing the crime, which is why you have an 88% FALSE POSTIVE rate of people being "totally innocent".


Thus, the police need to learn/train on a different perception/criteria: one that actually ties the person to doing something criminal, not one based upon the color of their skin.

NotMyKid said...

What? Since when does being a keyboard commando make you an expert?

Did you completely ignore what I said? Radio runs with matching descriptions make up many stops. Not every stop is a frisk.

So... What's the problem?

Eastwood Resident said...

Kitty, you are a very bright person. I say this because I know who you are. I can also agree with a lot of what you cited in your comment above. All except that PSD turned into something tyrannical under Guerra. You are going above and beyond to exaggerate. What happened to Anthony was not right, but you can't hold Guerra responsible for that. The officers that were present at the time of the incident are the ones to be looked at here. Also, don't forget that Guerra had a Deputy Director that had a lot of experience on this island. He came in under Jim Frye and he basically showed Guerra the ropes on the island.


Lastly, you have to admit that the title of PSD Director is not that big a deal here. The person who sits in that seat follows the orders of the RIOC President - who runs everything. I've spoken to several RIOC Board Members, and they had respect for Guerra, his professionalism and his penchant for caring. You mentioned something about people being able to point fingers at those who are no longer here, well I think you have to consider the finger being pointed at the RIOC Presidents that wanted the PSD to be more like a Police Force and less like a Security Guard outfit. Not saying he was perfect, but I think your over-the-top criticism of Guerra sounds a bit personal.

CheshireKitty said...

"What happened to Anthony was not right, but you can't hold Guerra responsible for that. The officers that were present at the time of the incident are the ones to be looked at here."



I understand that - but we can't say a certain ethos had not been established when Guerra was in charge.


Was any PSO disciplined for over-enforcement by Guerra? Were any of the officers involved in the Jones case ever written up? Or those that were involved with the deli incident - were any of them ever written up?


The reason why PSC got involved in these cases is because nothing ever happened - RIOC never did anything and PSD never did anything - to address the residents' complaints. The idea was, maybe the IG would do something. But it looks like even the IG will do nothing..


Maybe this is really an example of a small-town mentality - where anything adverse that may happen is brushed under the carpet, so that the powers-that-be aren't "embarrassed" by bad publicity. Right?


I hate to say it, especially because this is NYS, a bastion of liberalism, but it sure reminds me of Ferguson, insofar as Obama finally had to send Holder to Ferguson to make sure the investigation into the death of Michael Brown was conducted in a fair manner. On RI, in this day and age, evidently none of our complaints can be investigated in a fair manner - or even, investigated at all!


It's a classic case of PSD passing the complaints on to RIOC, RIOC passing the complaints on to IG, and the IG - our great hope - passing on commenting. Where is the justice? Maybe Obama should send Holder to RI, too.


I have nothing personally against Guerra. I used to be a supporter of Guerra - until the Jones beating. That horror of that incident threw all the prior incidents into focus. I think a lot peoples' outlooks on PSD changed overnight when they found out about the Jones incident. There is no other way to explain the outpouring of outrage at the Feb 2013 CC Meeting and at the subsequent PSC rallies.


Consider Guerra: Even after the Jones incident, Guerra wouldn't climb down from his stubborn position of over-enforcement. He said he always stood by whatever his officers did - he said that in the course of the abandoned patient in the wheelchair incident, when the caregiver of the patient was hauled into the PSD office for nothing, and had to leave the patient un-attended on the sidewalk, while she was harassed at PSD. Guerra may have been many things but he wasn't a nice man.


Many complaints were filed with the IG over a year ago. Evidently, nothing is going to come of them.. because the powers-that-be in our "small town" do not want to be "embarrassed..." That is now perfectly clear.


The entire travesty, from beginning to end, underlines why a CCRB-like body is needed for PSD. It's a shame Albany is too dysfunctional to pass legislation extending CCRB adjudication to PSD agencies throughout NYS.


Because the way things stand now, anybody who files complaints might as well throw their complaints directly into the garbage, rather than waste their time filing complaints.