Capital New York

Each week, Capital's editors and writers will offer a list of the events, activities, releases and personal obsessions that we are looking forward to during the next week. Here is a list of our anticipations.

J. Gabriel Boylan

It's looking like a quiet week for me, and I've been meaning to catch up on some reading. The other day I caught sight of, and was reminded of my deep desire to read Keith Richards' Life and, of course, use that as an excuse to listen to even more Stones than I usually do.

Still, I might be roused for a couple of things.

The coming week is a good one for a couple of musicians who I've come to love but who have (so far) steadfastly refuse to succeed. Hopefully they will all overcome that little hurdle soon enough.

First up, Saturday night at the Highline Ballroom is Diego Garcia, late of the great and underrated Elefant, whose album from last year held a whole lot of subtle charms, not least this song, which was one of those random downloads you end up listening to constantly.

Tuesday sees the release of Irish singer-songwriter (and fantastic moptop-haver) Fionn Regan's absolutely stunning sophomore album 100 Acres of Sycamore. Regan's music is at turns darkly taciturn, winningly pastoral, and, to use a term that usually means next to nothing in music writing, deeply haunted. It's well-rooted in folk traditions, with dashes of music-hall panache thrown in, but Regan's got a voice that's prettier than most folk practitioners, and reminds me of something between Tom Rush and the earliest albums of Al Stewart.

And of course, you could do worse that seeing Manhattan on the big screen.

Dana Rubinstein

New York Botanical Garden's Caribbean Garden
Dana: Though I like to garden, and belonged to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden when I lived nearby, my natural laziness has prevented me from visiting the New York Botanical Garden. On Saturday, I will fix that. It might seem like an odd time to make the trek Bronx-ward, but the cold should keep the throngs away, and there will still be plenty to see. Namely, the garden's collection of conifers, spread forest-like across 15 acres, and the Caribbean Garden exhibition housed until Feb 26 in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. In its press materials, the Garden waxes lyrical about the show's "orange-yellow crotons, fuschia bromeliads, and rosy red hibiscus." The air should be moist, and just maybe I will be able to forget that I'm in New York, in January.

Joe Pompeo

Grease Trucks
Joe: One night back in the fall, my fiance and I were having drinks with two friends of ours, a newly-married couple that I went to college with (but who were not a couple when we were all in school together; funny how things work out, right?), when we found ourselves talking about the Grease Trucks of New Brunswick, N.J., that storied Rutgers fast-food institution that has been shoveling calories down the throats of drunken undergrads since the early 1980s. (See video above.) So then of course someone goes, "We should totally take a drive one of these nights and eat Grease Truck sandwiches!" Only we ended up taking it a step further (five steps, maybe) and booked ourselves into two king-sized rooms at the Hyatt Regency in downtown New Brunswick this Saturday (grown-ups!) for no good reason other than to have something fun to look forward to on one of those depressing mid-winter weekends when it really starts to hit you that the warm weather is still at least two months away. Kind of like how fancy people with private jets can just hit the tropics for a few days whenever they need to warm up their toes. So we started referring to our modest overnight stay as "Island Weekend." The plan is to fire up the blender and max poolside all afternoon before meeting up with some fellow college-era friends for martinis and then grabbing dinner at one of New Jersey's best restaurants, The Frog and the Peach, around 8. I suspect the night will also include paying our respects to The Court Tavern, a legendary New Brunswick watering hole and music venue that abruptly closed its doors last week. "There's no sugarcoating it: the Court Tavern was a dive, a dark, ramshackle beer joint," The Village Voice wrote in homage. "It was completely unpretentious, and its various slogans ("Home of The Stars," "Cruel But Fair," "Home of the Floating Chromosome") matched its self-deprecating character." Grease Trucks for lunch maybe on Sunday.

Reid Pillifant

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Reid: I don't know very much about urban planning, but my friend (and occasional Capital contributor) Eliot Brown does, and he pointed me toward this documentary of the Pruitt-Ihoe housing complex in St. Louis. Pruitt-Ihoe was a massive, modernist bloc of nearly 3,000 apartments (designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center), back in the 1950s, when those were still in vogue. Within two decades, it had become a symbol of decay and dysfunction, and when the city blew it up in the early 1970s, it became a cautionary tale for public planning. The documentary, screening at IFC, tries to "implode the myth" about what went wrong, according to its website.

Azi Paybarah

"Alcatraz" vs. "LOST": A J.J. Abrams showdown
Azi: I'm going to try to not watch "The Third Jihad" which one reporter privately told me "is going to be the most-watched Islamaphobic snuff film in the history of the genre!"

Instead, I'm turning my gaze towards "Alcatraz," the new J.J. Abrams show that is in no uncertain terms an attempt to recapture the magic that made his other landmark show, "Lost," irresistible.

There are two—wait, three (three!)—episodes online now.

In short, it's about prisoners who mysteriously escaped (disappeared?) from that famous prison many years ago and, for some reason, are popping up, un-aged, in modern-day San Francisco.

So, you have mysterious islands, the time traveling, the eerie music. It's impossible not to compare "Alcatraz" and "Lost." Heck, even the colors in the font and the shows' logos are similar. If you listen closely enough, you'll hear the name Eloise mentioned too, which, if you stuck around for the final season of "Lost," will mean something (even if it's just a painful reminder of how awful that great show ended up being).

But all these coincidences, from a guy whose film and television career are built on the idea that there's something meaningful behind all these complicated connections, is hard to overlook. (One show Abrams helps launched, as executive producer, that, sadly, didn't survive was "Six Degrees" and was premised on the curious idea that you really don't know how interconnected you are to the people who, at fist glance, are just strangers you pass by on the street or in the train. That thread was a major theme in "LOST," and helped propel it out of the sci-fi adventure category into, potentially, a show about something more profound.)

In the first episode of "Alcatraz," you follow a guy who was in Alcatraz a long time ago. Now he's not. There's flashbacks to explain his backstory. Cops are after him. His name is Jack.

In the first episode of "Lost," the person you first meet is a doctor, along with a plane full of other people that crash landed on an island. He's hurt, but he helps others. He goes into the mysterious jungle looking for help and finds trouble. His name is Jack.

Initially, the "Lost" script called for Jack to die in the fist episode (which is why the actor who originally got cast for the role, Matthew Fox, actually auditioned for a different role—Sawyer!).

I won't say what happens to the Jack in "Alcatraz," but anyone who's seen "Lost" will feel a sense of deja vu.

There's Jorge Garcia, who played a lovable, slacker in "Lostw" and reprises that role again in "Alcatraz," except for one change. Instead of only being aware of how bizarre the story is, which means he sent plenty of "yeah, I'm with you" encouragements to the audience from inside the television. His new character is an expert on the official history of Alcatraz, which, again, allows him to act like an important device for the audience, neatly explaining what's going on, and holding our hands so we don't reach for the dial (do televisions have those anymore?).

There's something about the way J.J. Abrams is telling his ever-mysterious story. "Alcatraz," like "Lost," seems content to slowly, patiently, over many, many episodes, reveal one mystery after another. That didn't happen in the show "Person of Interest" and it quickly died. "Lost" alum Michael Emerson really had no shot at keeping that thing alive. Oh, and the guy chasing Jack, in the first episode of "Alcatraz." His name: it's Emerson.

Gillian Reagan

Bleached at Webster Hall
Gillian:  L.A. sister duo Jennifer and Jessica Clavin make summertime punk. They grew up listening to the Misfits, the Germs, and Blondie and learned how to play guitar from their dad in their garage. They broke into schools late at night to skateboard and built homemade bombs together. They called their first band Dead Banana Ladies. In 2003, as teenagers, they formed Mika Miko with three friends. The art-punk band's galloping rhythms, grimey riffs, and sleepover-party style vocals (sometimes sung through a telephone) charmed the Valley. If the Ramones wanted to be sedated, they wanted a turkey sandwich. After six years as post-riot grrrl punks having way more fun than everybody else, Mika Miko played their last show in 2009 at The Smell.

Two years later, the Clavin sisters reformed as Bleached. They're continuing their their playful punk tradition with a surf rock fringe—a soundtrack for a Joey Ramone and Stevie Nicks summer road trip that often veers onto dusty sideroads for private makeout parties. They'll be playing at Webster Hall on Tuesday, opening for the Smith Westerns (a band I have not heard yet because I am not as on top of new music as I seem, I suppose). I'm looking forward to a little sun in that dinge.

J. Gabriel Boylan

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