VOL. 13 ISSUE 2 Hours: (203) 734-1492 March - April 2020 Mon. - Thurs. 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. (203) 732-2913 FAX Sat. - Sun. 1 p.m. - 5 p.m. Privately Funded (Open Sat. & Sun. all year) 307 Hawthorne Avenue Derby, Connecticut 06418 www.derbynecklibrary.org email: [email protected] Derby Neck Library A Regional Library Currents Over a century of service to the Valley Community The Kerry Boys Return to the Derby Neck Library The Valley Counts! By April 1, 2020, every home will receive an invitation to participate in the 2020 Census. You will have three options for responding. All of them are easy: Online, Phone, and by Mail. The 2020 Census marks the first time you will be invited to respond online – even on your mobile device. The online form is available in many different languages. Visit 2020CENSUS.GOV for more information about responding online. The Census is very to easy to fill out. It’s only 9 questions and only one needs to be filled out per household. Each Census invitation that you receive in the mail has a PIN number specific to the address and you need this PIN to assist in filling out the Census online or by phone. What will I need to fill out the Census? Your PIN# Connecticut’s premier Irish balladeers, the The person in the housing unit who fills out the Census (Person 1) provides the Kerry Boys, will return to the Derby Neck Library on Saturday, March 21 at 2:00 pm for following information about each household member: a performance in recognition of St. Patrick’s Name, Relationship to Person 1, Sex, Age, Date of Birth, Race Day. An annual tradition here at the library, Please note: The law prevents the Census Bureau from sharing your information with law the Kerry Boys will perform a free one hour enforcement. Your answers cannot be used to impact your eligibility for government set of Irish favorites as well as some originals benefits. Your answers are only used to create statistics about our country. The Census for Derby Neck patrons of all ages. Bureau is bound by Title 13 of the U.S. Code to protect your personal information and The Kerry Boys are Mark James, originally keep it strictly confidential. That’s every answer, to every question. from the county Kerry Ireland now a Cheshire, CT resident, and Pierce Campbell, (CT’s official State Troubadour 2007/08) from Prospect, CT. These two dynamic and popular Connecticut Irish Balladeers combined their talents to form an exciting Irish music duo over 25 years ago, and have been dazzling audiences from Maine to Pennsylvania ever since. olocaust Remembrance Presentation There is no registration required for this H event, but seating will fill up quick. This Author Rebecca Freimann has made her debut as an program is sponsored by the Friends of the author with her book Family Tree: Rooted in Survival. Derby Neck Library. She has spent 8 plus years researching her family’s fates during the Holocaust. Within the pages of this book, she tells their stories; stories that have never Daylight before been told. She depicts her three family branches and their experiences. Saving As a former CT resident, Rebecca currently lives in Time NY and works as a special education teacher. Returning to DerbySunday, to share these March stories 10this incredibly meaningful Sunday, for Rebecca,Daylight since part Saving of her family Time escaped Begins the Nazis and later made Derby their home. March 8 ANDREW’S PICKS The Lobster (2015); The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017); The Favourite (2018). VITA Free Tax Preparation Services Yorgos Lanthimos is quite simply one of my favorite directors Begin at the Derby Neck Library working today. I’ve never seen his two earliest films, My Best VITA free tax preparation services continue at the Derby Neck Library on Friend (2001) and Kinetta (2005), since they’ve never been Sundays from 1-4:00pm throughout the tax released in the United States, but all five of his subsequent filing season. Households that earned less movies are masterpieces. Dogtooth (2009) in particular blew than $56,000 in 2019 may be eligible for me away when I first saw it in college, and it introduced me VITA’s free tax preparation services, provided to the two broad strands of amazing films that have been by IRS-certified volunteers at community centers, nonprofit organizations, and other coming out of Eastern Europe for the past two decades. First, there are the starkly convenient locations across CT. minimalist, often almost neo-realist Romanian films from directors like Corneliu For individuals and families that qualify, Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest, 2006), Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and VITA volunteers will work with you step by 2 Days, 2007), and Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 2005). step to ensure you file accurately and Then, almost as if in response, there are the boldly fantastic and even surrealist films on time. To schedule an appointment, call Team, pouring out of Greece from directors like Lanthimos, Athina Rachel Tsangari ( Attenberg, Inc. at 203-736-5420. For other VITA sites’ 2010), and Babis Makridis (Pity, 2018) — all of whom have collaborated frequently with hours of operation, dial 2-1-1 or visit one another and, significantly, with the writer Efthymis Filippou, thus lending a certain www.211ct.org or www.irs.gov cohesion to the “movement” in reality and not just in critical imagination. I am sure for directions and hours. social historians will plumb cultural and economic conditions in those two countries Please note that the final Derby Neck Library VITA Sunday will be April 5. Due and Europe more broadly to explore why two such (seemingly) antithetical schools to the Easter holiday on April 12, there will emerged, one after the other, in these two particular countries in the first part of the be no VITA services after the April 5 date. twenty-first century. But for the cinephile, the so-called “Romanian New Wave” and “Greek Weird Wave” might just as well be gifts from the Olympian gods, and indeed (heretical Marxist that I am) I find the latter “explanation” both more likely and certainly more appealing than any boring historical-materialist account. Moreover, the passionate Children’s Corner lover of both schools can discern deep connections between them. The Kafkaesque absurdity of the Romanian bureaucracy reaches at times almost surreal heights in Spring is on it’s way and Miss Kathi’s Puiu’s and especially Porumboiu’s films; in fact, even in his most documentary mode regular programs will continue throughout Porumboiu is half a surrealist—see, for instance, his hilarious Infinite Football (2018). the months of March and April. Two new As for the Greeks, their surrealism is by no means baroque; it even derives much of its special programs have been added power and strangeness from being situated so carefully in unremarkable, realistic starting in March. My 1st Baby is settings which are often as particular and carefully-drawn as those constructed by the especially for first time parents and Romanian “realists.” Lanthimos’s Alps (2011), for example, has a premise that seems Grandparents. Enjoy playing with that clearly fantastic and details that are deeply surrealist, but is played against a background new baby and making connections with that is both a late-capitalist bourgeois “anywhere” and yet somehow specifically Greek; other “First Timers”. Professionals will ditto for Makridis’s Pity. After making Alps, Lanthimos switched to the English language also be on hand to offer advice. We Are without missing a beat, and produced three more remarkable movies: The Lobster, Quiet is for sensitive children who need The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite. And now, after all this set-up, how does that extra attention in a more subdued one begin to describe a Lanthimos film? The bold, haunting cinematography of Antonioni space. Quiet music, low lights, sensory or Kubrick or Lynch, the unrelenting absurdity and subversive, satiric edge of Buñuel activities, soothing stories and a smaller or Chytilová, the quirky black humor and stylized performances of Herzog or Wes class will meet their needs. Check out Anderson, the inexorable precision and inscrutable depths of the Coen brothers or the calendar in this newsletter, our web Hitchcock . the list could go on and on. Any scion of so many remarkable forebears page, Facebook and Twitter for dates must be, paradoxically, a true original. and times. Though I would urge the reader to seek out Elif Batuman’s article on “Japan’s Rent-a- Family Industry” in the April 30, 2018 issue of The New Yorker; not to mention Werner Herzog’s Family Romance, LLC, which premiered at Cannes last year. Sinking of the Titanic with Jason Scappaticci The Titanic sank over 100 years ago but it still continues to fascinate people. What it is about this disaster that manages to hold the public’s interest? Why did it not carry enough lifeboats? Was it truly the most luxurious ship afloat? On Wednesday, April 15 at 6:30pm, come learn the story of Titanic and answers to many questions that keep us talking about it to this day. All programs will be drop-in with teen no registration required. We welcome EVENTS patrons from all towns to come and enjoy recurring children’s Teen Film Club the programs. The Derby Neck Library’s award- programs winning young adult film club is a Prethrees classes are for ages Birth-3yrs magnificent opportunity for all and offer age appropriate stories, finger aspiring artists.