On any given night in New York City, there are a multitude of free ways to entertain yourself or get inebriated and still have hours left in the evening. On June 4th, I did just that bringing along my camera to capture the events.
My first destination was the Apple Store in SoHo to hear Brian Wilson, John Cusack and Bill Polhad discuss the new biopic on Wilson, Love & Mercy. In the film, Paul Dano and Cusack both play the role of Wilson, in ’60s and ’80s incarnations respectively. The talk was part of the ‘Meet the Filmmaker’ series and is now available on iTunes as a podcast.
Having never seen The Beach Boys or Brian Wilson perform (Wilson won’t perform again due to laryngitis), I wanted to at least hear him. His wife Melinda was in the audience to remind him of a few details and it was a treat to hear him talk about the accuracy of the movie (which I have yet to see). Wilson noted that Paul Giamatti was so accurate in his portrayal of Dr. Landy that at times he had to look over his shoulder to make sure the Dr. wasn’t actually there.
A short while into the Q&A, an always worrisome time as attendees feel the need to share their own life stories, I made my way over to Kinfolk in Brooklyn to get a taste of the GSN show Skin Wars, via the Naked Couture: A Body-Painted Fashion Show. The television show returns for Season 2 on June 10th with host Rebecca Romijn, who had endured a lengthy body-painting process to transform into Mystique for the X-Men movies, and promises to reward the winning painters cash and fame.
When the fashion show began around 9 pm, people had their cameras out right away, capturing the barley clothed, intriguingly painted bodies. The style was an abstract, spacey theme not the cool animalistic or nature styles used in the promos. It took a good bit of study to reveal all the details of the models’ “couture” but there definitely was a lot of intricacy in the effort. (There was not a lot of intricacy involved in the Paper‘s feature of Miley Cyrus with some NSFW body-paint however.)
Love & Mercy:
Skin Wars:
Behind the scenes video (possibly NSFW):