The New York Observer‘s Fall Arts Preview issue hit newsstands this week. Assembled by Observer staff and contributors, the magazine offers a guide to culture in New York this season, from visual art to books to opera. Its contents are below, which include Dan Duray on the 100th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Arms and Armor collection, Michael H. Miller on Marco Roth and Daniel D’Addario on the upcoming films on American presidents. Read More

Le Poème Harmonique
The Miller Theatre at Columbia University
September 12 and 14
The photogenic and ultra-talented French early music ensemble Le Poème Harmonique opens the Miller Theatre’s season with “Venezia”—candlelit, semi-staged performances of songs by Monteverdi, Manelli and others. Expect lots of period-appropriate drama, as the group, which focuses on 17th and 18th century music, interprets works like Ferrari’s “Chi non sà come amor” and madrigals by Monteverdi. Music director Vincent Dumestre leads a production that uses vocal ornamentation and historic gestures to bring to mind life in 17th century Venice during Carnival. Read More

WITH THE ELECTION UPON US, it’s worthwhile to remember that movies have always been a good place to brush up on your presidential history—even if only of the kind that follows Hollywood’s rules. Filed under Presidential Villainy, you’ll find Nixon, Frost/Nixon and Dick (all taking on the 37th leader of the free world), Primary Colors (a thinly veiled, and pathologically power-hungry, 42th), and W (Oliver Stone’s self-parodic assessment of the 43rd). Hagiographies are, of course, more common: John Adams (on HBO), Jefferson in Paris, Young Mr. Lincoln, Pearl Harbor, with its heroic and unexpectedly mobile Franklin Roosevelt, the missile-crisis-averting Kennedy of Thirteen Days: the list goes on. This past summer, presidential hero-worship reached a nadir of incoherence, with Abraham Lincoln reinvented for the screen as a vampire hunter. And films currently in production include Michael Douglas as Reagan in the just-announced Reykjavik and a passel of stars playing Kennedy, Eisenhower, Johnson et al. in Lee Daniels’s The Butler. Read More

Anytime anybody mentions Michael Shannon, the first reaction is, ‘That guy’s an amazing actor’—I mean, universally, everyone knows this to be true, because it is.”

That’s Paul Rudd waxing rhapsodic about the man he will start sharing the stage and marquee of the Cort Theatre with Sept. 13 when previews begin for Craig Wright’s Grace—and, even in that euphoric description, you can hear the “but” coming. “The second thing I seem to hear from people,” he gingerly post-scripted, “is, ‘Jesus, he’s scary! He’s so intimidating!’” Read More