• POEMobile Rides Again • WE LIKE IT LIKE THAT • Deaf Jam
• Yo Miss! • Place Matters Awards • brevitas

Dear Citylorists,

Please enjoy our Tours and Tales November 2011 e-letter!

Photo by Vivian I. Perez

• The POEMobile Rides Again — Tribute to the Nuyoricans •On November 8th, the POEMobile visits the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Loisaida. Appropriate to Alphabet City (East 3rd between B and C), the letters are writ large and projected life size on the legendary birthplace of Nuyorican poetry. The projections accompany readings by the Nuyorican pioneers, Sandra Maria Esteves, Tato Laviera, Lois Griffith, Jesús "Papoleto" Meléndez; Louis Reyes Rivera; and surprise guests! Poets perform and thePOEMobile projects Jorge Brandon’s tribute to baseball star Roberto Clemente, El astro de Carolina. The POEMobileexperience has been described in a single word: sublime.

This month, our featured tour on City of Memory features the Nuyorican poets!

When: Tuesday, November 8, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Where: Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 236 E. 3rd Street, Manhattan. 
Admission: FREE 
For more information: 212-529-1955, x 306 or 308

• WE LIKE IT LIKE THAT: The Story of Latin Boogaloo • As part of this year’s Boromix Puerto Rico Fest 2011, SEA, City Lore, and Baruch College present WE LIKE IT LIKE THAT. In 1965, on the verge of abandoning Latin music, a generation of young Latinos in NYC discovers Latin Boogaloo, a musical style mixing English and Spanish lyrics, with Afro-Cuban, jazz, rock and R&B rhythms and melodies. Featuring original interviews with legends like Joe Bataan, Johnny Colón, Ricardo Ray and others, Mathew Ramírez Warren’s documentary, WE LIKE IT LIKE THATexplores the story of the Latin Boogaloo era and seeks to understand its legacy and context in history. A rough cut of the film (45 minutes) will be shown, and it will be followed by a panel dicussion and Q&A featuring musicians from that era who are also featured in the film: Joe Bataan, Johnny Colón, Benny Bonilla, and director, Mathew Ramírez Warren. The panel will be moderated by City Lore’s Elena Martínez, one of the film’s producers.

When: Wednesday, November 16, 7:00pm
Where: Baruch College, 55 Lexington Avenue, Room VC 6-210. Parking: 24th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenue—save your receipt from that and we will reimburse you. 
Admission: FREE 
For more information: 212-529-1955 x 306

• DEAF JAM on Independent Lens • In 2004, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and NEA, City Lore createdThe Poetry Dialogues in collaboration with Urban Word, assembling a series of "poetry teams" with youth poets and mentors who developed artful presentations designed to generate dialogues in community settings. Among these was a team of Deaf teenagers from Lexington School for the Deaf. Judy Lieff, who worked with us to develop the workshops recently directed a major documentary film that emerged from the project, coproduced by City Lore.

As Barbara Pokras wrote at the film’s North American premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival, "Aneta Brodski, a spirited and vivacious Israeli-born girl living in Queens, dreams of seeing the world, but for her and others at The Lexington School for the Deaf, communication with the hearing presents obstacles. How to bridge the divide? ASL Poetry, a powerful and passionate visual language in which body movement and expression create meaning, presents a possible path toward understanding… Delightful and endearing, utilizing upbeat music and clever graphics, Deaf Jam immerses us in the richness and complexity of deaf culture and gives us a unique perspective into a world so vibrant, so diverse, it may forever change the way we see the non-hearing." (Barbara Pokras, A.C.E.)

You can watch a trailer of the film here.

What: Deaf Jam documentary directed by Judy Lieff, cosponsored by City Lore
Where: On TV! PBS, Indepenndent Lens 
When: WNET (Channel 13), Sunday, November 6, 11:00pm
WLIW (Channel 21), Wednesday, November 9, 8:00pm
WLIW (Channel 21), Saturday, November 12, 12:00noon

• Judith Sloan’s Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide • What happens when a performing artist survives a near-fatal car accident and collides with the oncoming traffic of Hip Hop culture? In Yo Miss!actress/writer Judith Sloan remixes stories from twenty years of reporting on and teaching immigrant/refugee teenagers and incarcerated youth as they grapple with the cataclysmic global events that shaped them. Through poetry, vivid character portrayals and music, she brings their tales to life along with her own stories revealing the ripple effects of the Holocaust on her family. Sifting through a maze of miscommunications and misunderstandings, Sloan and the musicians battle through a cross-generational dialogue as she finds resilience in the face of tragedy.

As the coauthor of Crossing the Boulevard, the now classic volume of oral histories with Queens’ new immigrants, Judith’s work has always reinterpreted and re-imagined the urban milieu in inventive ways. For Yo Miss!, she teams up with musicians Frank London of the Klezmatics, Dave Guy, Adam Hill, David Krakauer, MiWi La Lupa (band member from Red Baraat), Taylor Rivelli, Immortal Technique, Ken White, Touré "Southpaw" Harris, and Guy Klucevsek. Talkback following the SUNDAY Matinee performance: with Julissa Ferreras, City Council Member Queens / Jackie Vimo, New York Immigration Coalition / Mallika Dutt, Breakthrough.

When: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Novermber 3, 4, 5 at 7:00pm and Sunday, November 6 at 3:00pm
Where: Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 236 E. 3rd Street, Manhattan.
Admission:$20 general, $15 students/seniors/groups 
For more information and to purchase tickets: 212-780-9386 or earsay.org or nuyorican.org

• Place Matters Awards •The Place Matters Awards last week shone a brilliant spotlight on a worthy group of iconic Lower Manhattan sites. The standing-room-only event was followed by raucous dance party let by the inimitable Hot Pstromi klezmer band. Meet our awardees in this lovely video tribute. See the pictures and read all about it in the Bowery Boogie Blog.

• brevitas Festival of the Short Poem • Everyone with a passion, flair and fascination for short poems is invited to attend the 8th Annualbrevitas Festival of the Short Poem at The Bowery Poetry Club on Sunday, November 6 at 2 pm.

Poets Jim Pignetti and Steve Zeitlin (founder of City Lore) launchedbrevitas by inviting a variety of committed poets to share original, short poems (14 lines max) with each other via email on the 1st and 15th of each month. This experiment has nurtured the scintillating collection of over 230 short poems in the anthology 2011 brevitas 8 that will be celebrated and released as part of the Festival. Poems will be projected and performed. Books will be signed. Literary antics will entertain. Food and drink will be available. Laughter, pith and meaning will collide.

The 40 brevitas readers are a feisty mixture of well-known, emerging, irrepressible and irreverent artists and poets, including program host Bob Holman, international spoken-word poetry guru and founder of The Bowery Poetry Club; Poet Laureate of Queens Hal Sirowitz; New Yorker poet Sparrow; Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the New York Public Library Flash Rosenberg; and yours truly.

Poets in the audience will have an opportunity to signup for the Short Poem Open Mic (14 lines max).

When: Sunday, November 6 at 2:00pm – 6:00pm 
Where: Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (between E. Houston St and Bleecker St), Manhattan.
Admission: $7
For more information and to purchase tickets: 212-529-1955 x 301, 914-330-1367

Please forward this email to your friends and encourage them to join the City Lore’s email list!

Enjoy the City!

City of Memory is sponsored by City Lore and Local Projects.  It was funded by The Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

City Lore is part of a cultural coalition called CATCH, to promote the City’s cultural heritage. Check out the web sites of our wonderful partners, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, the Latino Children’s Theater, SEA, and the World Music Institute.