Brooklyn-based quintet The National have spent the last nine years slowly and steadily evolving from bar-band hobby to indie rock royalty, a success built out of old fashioned techniques like laborious songwriting, tireless gigging and the organic cultivation of their own distinct sound: a bruised, moody elegance that swells and crashes under the dreamy baritone of front man Matt Berninger. Their fourth and most recent album, Boxer, was a usual suspect on critical top ten......

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to celebrate his accomplishments as a civil rights leader and to remember there is still work to be done in many areas, from racial equality to living a more peaceful, understanding existence. King's birthday is actually January 15, 1929, but the federal holiday has been observed on the third Monday of January since 1986 (the first time all 50 states observed the holiday was in 2000). With the......

The Brooklyn Academy of Music kicked off their fourth season of Eat Drink & Be Literary last night at the BAMcafé. The sold-out event revolved around author George Saunders, a craftsman of absurdly hilarious short story and essays that lovingly lift American consumerism and mass media to surreal heights. His laugh-out-loud short story Pastoralia, for instance, concerns a man and a woman portraying full-time troglodytes in a theme park exhibit. In 2006, Saunders, who has......

In Samuel Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, a decidedly upbeat woman named Winnie spends Act One striving valiantly to make the best of her sticky situation: she’s irrevocably buried up to her waist in a “low mound.” True, Winnie has her reticent companion Willie for company, but she cheerily defies the barren void by holding forth for a seemingly nonexistent gathering of spectators. And Act Two finds Winnie still determined to make a go of......

The NY Post has video and renderings of what downtown Brooklyn will look like in 2012. With $9.5 billion in development projects in the works, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is proudly touting its future. The DBP's president Joe Chan told the Post, "This sends a message to the entire city - and even the world - that Brooklyn is in a period of unprecedented growth." The video, which will be released later today but......

READING: Our interviewee from yesterday, Adrian Tomine, will be reading tonight at Book Court. The graphic novelist not only has his work in some of the more prestigious rags, he's also got a full length graphic novel, titled Shortcomings. 7pm // Book Court [163 Court St, Cobble Hill] // Free At a very different reading in Manhattan, Chris Matthews will be promoting his new political memoir Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About......

W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism Brooklyn Academy of Music Repressive political regimes and free-wheeling cultural expression can go together hand in hand, and the flowering of film in Yugoslavia during the '60s is a great example of it. BAM Cinematek is devoting a series this month to this Black Wave, a film movement that combined "artistic, sexual, and ideological freedom with a sense of humor." One of the major features in this group of films......

The New Decade: Hong Kong Film BAM Cinématek A pervasive theme in the films coming out of the prolific national cinema of Hong Kong has been their transfer over to China in 1997. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is putting a spotlight on this preoccupation in their current series The New Decade: Hong Kong Film. Running through the end of next weekend, the series offers a number of intriguing prospects made in the last 10......

In honor of the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday, the city of Vienna commissioned a special festival of visual art, music, dance, architecture, and film called New Crowned Hope. The name refers to the Masonic lodge Mozart co–founded, a venue in which he made his last public appearance. Beginning this weekend, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host screenings of six films made for the festival by some of the most exciting directors......

The Sundance Institute at BAM Brooklyn Academy of Music For the second year in a row, BAM has teamed up with the Sundance Institute in Park City, Utah to bring a selection of innovative film, theater and music programming to Brooklyn audiences. Last night the series kicked off with a screening of the adorable Son of Rambow, an audience favorite from the '07 festival in January about two English school boys in the '80s creating......

For politicians, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was busy as they made the rounds at a number of city events. Governor Spitzer, Lieutenant Governor Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and Representative Charles Rangel all appeared at the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network's House Justice and also the Brooklyn Academy of Music's celebration. Paterson and Rangel emphasized that the Iraq war would have been opposed by King. Spitzer mentioned meeting the family......

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. City offices, post offices and other government buildings are closed today in observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Public schools are closed, as well. Some offices are closed today, too, and there are a number of events to participate in. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has its 21st Annual Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which includes a musical celebration and special guests like Senator......

THEATER: Dance-theatre maverick Pina Bausch returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Nefés, which is described as an ode to Istanbul, 'the city of water'. Originally conceived in 2002, Nefés (Turkish for "breath") “quickly became a life-affirming response to Istanbul's bouts with political upheaval. But rather than echoing the violence, Bausch invests her signature humor and emotional pathos with an acute sense of calm. Set to an eclectic score featuring Turkish songs, tangos from......

"Can you feel me? Can you motherfuckin' feel me?" Adira Amram belts out on her song "Wanna Make Out," which she sings while dressed in leotards, a Betsey Johnson push-up bra and suit jacket, or other attention-getting garb while pounding away on a keyboard or piano. Amram, the daughter of composer David Amram, started out as an actress but has taken to performing her hilarious “keyboard fantasy” songs at local comedy gigs. The 25-year-old performer......

Holy Temple of Dendur! The Metropolitan Museum of Art has raised its suggested admission fee to $20, up from $15. The important thing to note is that the Met does not require people pay an admission fee - you can donate a dollar or a few coins (or nothing at all) and you can still get in. While the Met says the increase was prompted by a $3 million annual operating deficit, we have......

READING: Head down to the awesome 192 Books to catch New Yorker A.M. Homes read from her latest, hyperbolically-titled novel - This Book Will Save Your Life. A.M. Homes, whose dead-pan morbidity brought us Music For Torching, brings her eye to the world of Richard Novak, a day-trader determined to change his life. Some of the reviews have been less than celebratory, but Homes is a fascinating character on the literary scene and certainly worth......

You have the long stem roses and box of chocolates on tap, but what else? What else to plan for your cinema-lovin' sweetie? Hey, nothing spells l'amour like dinner and a movie. In Brooklyn, BAM's Rose Cinématek offers tonight a prix fix dinner at the BAMcafé and then a special screening of the 1941 comedy, Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper. "A......

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to celebrate his accomplishments as a civil rights leader and to remember there is still work to be done in many areas, from racial equality to living a more peaceful, understanding existence. It was 20 years ago on January 20, 1986, that it was observed as a federal holiday. Today, government offices, schools, and banks are closed. MLK Day is also recognized as a national day of service,......

Gothamist managed to get on over to the new IFC Center this weekend to see Miranda July's excellent Me and You and Everyone We Know and decided to check out the food as well. We had heard that there was going to be an adjacent restaurant serving a gourmet take on pub fare and wanted to see if it was any good. If our initial visit is an accurate indication of things to come, the......

Just in case you haven't been keeping up on this, movies from Korea are the new "It" Asian cinema. Leading the way in this art house trend is the work of director Chan Wook Park whose film, OldBoy won the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival. The Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rose Cinemas will be doing a mini-festival of Park's films this weekend and OldBoy, set to be released theatrically later in......

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the government, school, post officer, and financial markets are closed (city subways and buses run on weekday schedules, and there is regular garbage and recycling pick up, though). One interesting MLK Day event in the city is the 19th Annual Tribute to Martin Luther King at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The tribute includes performances by Melba Moore and Lilias White with the Brooklyn Ecumenical Choir of......

Always a film writer whose approach to criticism places the movies within their cultural context, it makes sense that J. Hoberman of the Village Voice would be interested in political movies during an election year. Tonight at BAM Cinemathéque he will present films that "give an insider’s look into America’s presidential campaigns." At 6:50 pm will be a feature, Four More Years directed by TVTV Collective (1972) with the short, Campaign Manager (1964), directed by......

Bob McKee, Local Music Now...

The NY Times had a nice article about the restoration of the cornice, as well as the whole exterior, of the Brooklyn Academy Music. The new exterior will be finished up for an October unveiling, but one of the things that Gothamist has liked about BAM's renovation was the gingerbread-house-photograph over the scaffolding - aka CandyBAM. A Public Arts Fund project, photographer Vic Muniz took a photograph of a gingerbread house based BAM and then......

BAM's Rose Cinema will be showing the films of Wong Kar-Wai starting this weekend, in their program, Living in Dreams: Films of Wong Kar-Wai. Wong's work is romantic, and moves between being hilarious to unbelievably sad. The first film, on Friday, is Happy Together, with the late Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung as lovers in Buenos Aires, and on Saturday, Chungking Express will be shown. Chungking Express is one of Gothamist's favorite films, with......