Avant-garde relics, remixes and… robots?… pull our ears to the ground and our eyes to the horizon.
Monday, January 27
At 4 p.m., the next virtual Mondays at Beinecke talk highlights “Early Black Students at Yale and in the Civil Rights Movement.”
At 6 at Branford’s Blackstone Library, James Powers of the Quinnipiac Dawnland Museum discusses “The History of the Totoket Band of the Quinnipiac Tribe.” The talk will cover “what we know about their relationship with the Dutch and then English colonists and how, eventually, most of them joined with their fellow Quinnipiac in leaving the Connecticut Shoreline area.”
Starting at 7, Three Sheets hosts a tribute to the late director David Lynch, promising “a special food and drink menu,” Twin Peaks on VHS and “trivia about the legendary life and career of this icon of film and philosophy,” with prizes at stake.
Tuesday, January 28
From noon to 1, the Yale Center for British Art hosts its next online “Artists in Conversation” conversation with Raqib Shaw, a London-based maker of “opulent, jewel-like paintings and sculptures” influenced by “Persian carpets, Renaissance art, Japanese lacquerware, and mythology from both Eastern and Western traditions.”
Wednesday, January 29
At 2 p.m., Wilson Branch Library screens a classic, Contact (1997), whose gripping personal drama and sharp examination of science brim with heart and brains.
From 6 to 8, MakeHaven hosts a drop-in work session for people looking to enter the New Haven T-Shirt Design Competition. “Snacks and supplies will be provided.”
Thursday, January 30
At 7 in Yale’s Humanities Quadrangle, a screening series inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) continues with a showing of The Green Fog (2017), an “audacious recreation of Vertigo using found footage taken from other films and TV shows.”
At 8, it’s the opening performance of a four-show run of Grandmother/Bathtub at Yale Cabaret. “Grandmother won’t leave the tub, even though it’s on a fault-line ready to blow. Nat comes home sometimes to give her a bath and keeps vowing to leave for good. They don’t speak the same language but they try to reconcile every death and every word. The world keeps splitting open. They keep trying.”
Friday, January 31
On an 8 p.m. bill at Hamden’s Space Ballroom, double-tribute act Weird Phishes puts on Radiohead’s pants and Phish’s shirt when it performs the former’s legendary album OK Computer in the latter’s style.
Saturday, February 1
From 10 a.m. through late afternoon, Yale-China’s annual Lunarfest returns to celebrate the coming Year of the Snake. Starting with a lion dance parade near the base of Whitney Avenue, festivities from a scavenger hunt to a shadow puppet show/workshop to kung fu and tai chi demonstrations then scatter across nine locations, with shopping specials and discounts at about a dozen shops in the Whitney-Audubon District.
Also starting at 10 a.m., an all-day qualifier for the Norwalk-based National Havoc Robot League’s 2025 Open World Championships promises “non-stop action across all our cages with 150+ robots fighting through the preliminary rounds to get to the last 8 of the main bracket,” which starts at 7 p.m. FYI, the robots are like BattleBots, not Terminators.
Also starting at 7 p.m., in conjunction with the exhibit Remembering Amnesia: Rebooting the First Computerized Novel, Yale’s 53 Wall Street auditorium screens Basic Computer Terms (1976), “an educational short directed by Yale alumnus and Pacific Film Archive founder Sheldon Renan that demystifies technical terminology from the early days of personal computing,” and The Social Network (2010), a dramatized telling of the rise of Facebook.
Sunday, February 2 - Groundhog Day
Connecticut’s de facto groundhog prognosticator, Chuckles, who lives at the Lutz Children’s Museum in Manchester, is set to make his annual appearance. “Join us at the museum to watch Chuckles emerge from his burrow and see if he sees his shadow, signifying six more weeks of winter or an early spring,” organizers say, though you may have to reserve a spectator spot to find out exactly when you should appear to witness the prediction.
Written by Dan Mims. Image, featuring a moment during last year’s lion parade, photographed by Sharyn Phu. Readers are encouraged to verify times, locations, prices and other details before attending events.
