Being at the Brooklyn Book Festival—which I also attended in its year of inception, and which has clearly multiplied its prowess since then—was rejuvenating. Really, it’s not a bad place to be at on a Sunday when you’ve been feeling brain-dead for months. I only wish I’d gotten there soon enough to catch more panels than I did.
The annual Brooklyn Book Festival returns to Borough Hall this Sunday (forecast is sunny), featuring a multitude of vendors, panels and workshops, and covering a wide range of interests: fiction, poetry, biography, comics, politics. Admission is free, but a ticket must be picked up for select events, such as the Poetry, Pop, and Hip-Hop panel, where Thurston Moore and Lupe Fiasco, amongst others, discuss “how poets, songwriters and rappers push language in new and essential ways”. See full schedule
Since you can pick up a ticket only an hour prior to each event, and the turnout was great last year, making it into ticketed panels one after the next will probably be impossible. Here are the ones I’ll be trying to get into.
Filmmaker Astra Taylor, whose debut was the documentary Zizek!, has been touring with her latest, Examined Life, which has brought her back to New York as limited screenings resumed yesterday at Symphony Space. You really can’t go wrong when you’ve brought together a fresh selection of eight contemporary philosophers to devote a high density 10-minute segment to each one; but in addition to that, the personalities have been curated with careful thought to whose idea bounces off whose, and effective cinematic decisions have been deployed, the prominent one being the attempt to take philosophy out on the streets and put it in motion, so that it feels like the ideas are awakening in a social space (the park, 5th avenue, the lake, the airport, etc), instead of being presented to us in the form of stationary talking heads positioned in some well-lit room.
