Get-rich quack

Cornell Cinema screens the Ithaca premiere of the documentary “Nuts!” Sept. 15 at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre, with guest filmmaker Penny Lane.

Using animated re-enactments, interviews and archival footage, Lane details the life of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an infamous quack who rose from poverty and obscurity to build an empire in Depression-era America. His ventures included a million-watt radio station, a goat-testicle impotence cure (and the invention of junk mail) – and he was (sort of) elected governor of Kansas.

Also showing: A digital restoration of Nicolas Ray’s 1954 Western “Johnny Guitar,” Sept. 12 at 9:15 p.m., with Sterling Hayden, Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge caught in a bizarre Freudian love/lust triangle. 

Jazz concert

A concert with jazz pianist Fred Hersch begins the 114th season of the Cornell Concert Series, Wednesday, Sept. 14, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall Auditorium. Tickets are $25, $17 for students; single tickets and subscriptions are available online.

Hersch is a critically acclaimed innovator and eight-time Grammy nominee who has shaped jazz for more than three decades as a recording artist, composer, educator, bandleader, improviser and collaborator. The New York Times Magazine declared him “singular among the trailblazers of their art, a largely unsung innovator of … borderless, individualistic jazz for the 21st century.”

The 2016-17 season features nine performances, including Sphinx Virtuosi, Sept. 30; and Zakir Hussain with Niladri Kumar, Oct 14, both in Bailey Hall.

Succeeding in college

Daniel Schwarz gives a Chats in the Stacks talk on his book “How to Succeed in College and Beyond,” Sept. 14 at 4:30 p.m. in 107 Olin Library.

Reflecting on his 48 years on the Cornell faculty, Schwarz shares feedback and suggestions from previous students, colleagues and administrators to provide an insightful guide to the undergraduate experience, the joy of learning and the options available to students in each year of study and after graduation. He highlights the importance of studying the humanities, no matter what your major; and provides advice to parents.

Schwarz, the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature at Cornell, is the author of 17 books and writes about higher education for The Huffington Post.

Chats in the Stacks book talks are free and open to the public, with refreshments served. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

‘Empathy’ Biennial opens

An artist talk by Cornell Council for the Arts 2016 Biennial artist-in-residence Pepon Osorio, Sept. 15 at 5:15 p.m. in Milstein Auditorium, will launch biennial events and exhibitions on campus. All events are free and open to the public.

Jason Koski/Cornell Marketing Group

2016 CCA Biennial artist-in-residence Pepon Osorio launches his participation with a public artist's talk, Sept. 15 in Milstein Auditorium.

The biennial, “Abject/Object Empathies,” is focused on the cultural production of empathy and features art and research collaborations by faculty, student and guest artists. Projects on display all semester range from large-scale outdoor installations on the Arts Quad and Libe Slope to an interactive “Race & Empathy Project” site in Mann Library, which collects and shares audio of Cornellians’ experiences with racial empathy, in collaboration with the Intergroup Dialogue Project.

Video projections at various sites across campus Sept. 15 also kick off events, which include a daylong series of “Biennial Conversations” with the artists Sept. 16. Osorio has been engaging with Cornell scholars and students for his project, intended to show the university as a representational system and a site of overlapping social realities. It will be installed in April.

Joy Harjo reading

The Department of English Program in Creative Writing presents Native American poet, scholar and musician Joy Harjo, Thursday, Sept. 15, at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. Part of the Fall 2016 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series, the reading is free and open to the public.

A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harjo is a professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her books include the memoir “Crazy Brave” (winner of the PEN USA Literary Award and the American Book Award) and eight books of poetry.

Harjo’s honors also include the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the United States Artist Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2009 Native American Music Award for Best Female Artist of the Year for her album “Winding Through the Milky Way.”

‘Technologies of Memory’

A concert of new music by 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon kicks off a fall event series, “Technologies of Memory,” Sept. 15 at 8 p.m. in Sage Chapel. Works focused on spirituality and music will include music for choir, string quartet and amplified rock ensemble, and the premiere of Wolfe’s “Retrieve” for cello and double bass, performed by John Haines-Eitzen and Tomoya Aomori.

The concert is co-presented by the Department of Music, with series sponsors the Jewish Studies Program (JSP) and Cornell University Library. The composers also join a Cornell Cinema program, Sept. 14 at 7:15 p.m., of eight short films by experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, on which they collaborated as soundtrack composers.

Wolfe and Gordon are co-founders of New York City-based Bang on a Can. Much of their music “speaks to the difficult history of the 20th century that ‘Technologies of Memory’ is meant to address,” said Jonathan Boyarin, JSP director and professor of anthropology.

Cornell provides access to The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive of some 53,000 individual testimonies of Holocaust and genocide survivors. The event series “aims to promote discussion on campus and in the community [of] how the experience of mass violence preserved in this archive is conveyed to future generations,” Boyarin said. “It reminds us that attempts to address violence now and in the future cannot dispense with the legacy of memory.”

“Technologies of Memory” events are free and open to the public, and include a screening Sept. 29 of the little-seen 1966 Soviet Holocaust film, “Eastern Corridor,” and discussion with film scholar Olga Gershenson; and lectures such as “School Photos in Holocaust Europe: Archives of Possibility,” Nov. 10.

French organ dedication

St. Luke Lutheran Church, 109 Oak Ave. in Collegetown, dedicates its new French Romantic organ during a weekend music festival Sept. 16-18. Built by Juget-Sinclair of Montreal, the organ replicates the sound and console design of a late-19th-century organ by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, maker of instruments found in the great cathedrals of Europe and Latin America.

The celebration, “Cavaillé-Coll in Ithaca,” is open to the public and sponsored by the Friends of Music at St. Luke, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies and the Cornell Department of Music. For information and to reserve free tickets for evening concerts, email ithacafrenchorgan@gmail.com.

Michel Bouvard, professor at the Paris Conservatory and an organist at the Royal Chapel of the Palace of Versailles, performs a recital of works showcasing the new instrument, Friday, Sept. 16, at 8 p.m. Bouvard also offers a master class Sept. 17, followed by an improvisation class with William Porter.

Sept. 17 at 8 p.m., organists David Higgs, Anne Laver, Annette Richards, Jonathan Schakel and Jeffrey Snedeker perform a program of vocal and instrumental collaborations with the Cayuga Vocal Ensemble and area musicians. A Sunday service Sept. 18 at 10 a.m. will feature the St. Luke Choir on Louis Vierne’s “Messe Solennelle.”