What the Review’s Staff Is Doing This Week: August 21–27

Flushing Meadows Fairgrounds. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC0 4.0.

Artists & Writers Annual Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, August 19: Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in East Hampton at a loose end this coming Sunday, it is the annual artists vs. writers softball game. In fact, it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of said game, which began as a picnic in 1948 and has seen the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell at bat. Anyone can spectate. (The Review’s softball team, meanwhile, is coming off three straight rainouts.) 

U.S. Open qualifiers at Flushing Meadows, August 22–25: Next week, 128 men’s players and 128 women’s players will be vying for the final 32 spots in the tournament. The beauty of this particular week is that it’s 100 percent free and open to the public. Our intern Izzy Ampil plans to be in attendance, and friend of the Review and Club Leftist Tennis cohead Charlie Dulik says it’s a “great way to scout up-and-coming guys in the tennis world.”

What That Quilt Knows About Me at the American Folk Art Museum, through October 29: This exhibition, recommended by our intern Anna Rahkonen, showcases forty quilts, some dating back to the nineteenth century. The quilts were made by a wide-ranging group of artists and craftspeople, among them a pair of enslaved sisters from antebellum Kentucky and an unnamed British soldier during the Crimean War. 

Kazuo Hara retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, August 16–31: At Anthology, a run of the intimate, activist documentaries of the Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara—including portraits of life with cerebral palsy (Goodbye CP, 1972); victims of asbestos exposure (Sennan Asbestos Disaster, 2016) and mercury poisoning (Minamata Mandala, 2020); and an increasingly unhinged Pacific War veteran seeking answers about the mysterious deaths in his regiment (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, 1987). Most exciting to our associate editor Amanda Gersten: the by all accounts brutally voyeuristic Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974). After Hara’s ex-wife leaves him for a relationship with a woman, he follows her to Okinawa for a year, where she opens a nursery for the children of sex workers, joins a women’s commune, begins seeing an American GI, gives birth to her second child on camera, and enumerates Hara’s many flaws for his then girlfriend (who is also the film’s producer).

AFUEGO! Party at Deluxx Fluxx, August 26: The East Village nightclub Deluxx Fluxx hosts a monthly party that our former intern Alejandra Quintana Arocho never misses. “They have an incredible sound system, arguably the best in the city,” Alejandra says. “You can sway to the rhythms of reggaeton, R&B, dancehall, Afrobeats, and the occasional bachata.”

Ecuagenera NYC Pop-up at Brooklyn Horticulture, August 26–27: RARE PLANTS! There will be a tropical plant extravaganza at this Gowanus plant shop next Saturday and Sunday, hosted in conjunction with the plant conservator and producer Ecuagenera, which focuses on orchid species and hybrids. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, is going, in an attempt to finally finish decorating her apartment. 

Roundup: Pixies and Modest Mouse with Cat Power on the roof at Pier 17, August 21 (Amanda Gersten); Afropunk Festival at Greenpoint Terminal Market, August 26-27 (Cami Jacobson, engagement editor); The Italian Job at Metrograph, August 24 (Sophie Haigney); series curated by the filmmaker John Wilson at Anthology Film Archives, August 19–29 (Amanda Gersten).